Clean Toolbar class for Windows

Targets Windows
1

Hi Folks,

I’m porting an older tool from OS X to Windows and Linux that uses a toolbar. This tool looks and works great on Linux and OS X, but on Windows, it looks like a total hack because of the inconsistent look of the Xojo built-in toolbar. I remember some old toolbar replacements back in the 2010 era, but I’m finding dead links now when I Bing/Google search.

Has anyone come up with an elegant and more native looking toolbar for windows?

Thanks,
Tim

2

I just noticed how clean the toolbar is in the Xojo IDE on Windows. This leads to the question - if the toolbar in the IDE looks that nice on Windows, why isn’t that the toolbar class that we get as app developers?

3

No thoughts on this? Are others really satisfied with the default Toolbar class under Windows?

4

Not satisfied.

And I think Xojo itself is actually NOT using a toolbar but a canvas.

5

Sorry that my frustration is surfacing, but that’s a big part of the Xojo dichotomy - they don’t provide the frameworks that developers need to create the same class of application that we’re expected to use to create the applications …

This goes back to a simple request that’s been in the Feedback system for a very long time:

<https://xojo.com/issue/18112>

6

You are not the only one. I would love a better toolbar class. I use something which I think is called UltraToolbar. I have some modifications to it.

7

The class I am using is called LVToolbar. I think it is from Alex Restrepo. It has some good features.

8

I highly doubt Xojo is using the native toolbar. I seem to remeber that the native toolbar does not support wide spacing like it does on Mac. But with Xojo’s toolbar it has wide spacing. Most likely a canvas.

9

I use the ToolBar from Jeremie Leroy, works great under Windows and inexpensive. It’s canvas-based and Retina ready.

10

Same reason we don’t get with the base toolkit (which we use as well).
The native Win32 provided toolbar looks the way it does - and its not great we know that.
It IS the native control’s appearance & functionality.

So we did what any developer could do & wrote a replacement for the IDE which does what we needed.
Its not set up to be generic so making it “the toolbar class that we get as app developers?” simply means

  1. rip it out of the IDE
  2. make it generic
  3. put it back IN the IDE and rework all the spots that now don’t work the same way
  4. ship it
  5. maintain it as a separate project so we don’t accidentally let more “IDE ONLY” functionality creep back in and constantly merge it back in

The Inspector, Code Editor, Source list & several other pieces could probably be useful as generic components with the same kind of external maintenance on them to keep them “generic”

Not impossible but not something we set out as a design goal when we built the new IDE
It was a big enough job without tossing that extra requirement on the pile

11

There are many entries about ToolBar in the xDev magazine, issues:

2.5 §2004-05), 4.4 (2006-03), 5.4 (2007-5), 5.5 (2007-07), 7.1 (2008-11), 10.5 (2°12-07) and 11.5 (2013-09).

Check details xDev Home.

Nota: I do not checked in xDev issues 12.2 and 12.3 (2014). Oh, and I do not read the articles.

Search courtesy of “The Completist Reader” (data archiving project).