Why is Konfabulator "Pretty?"

[Bill Marriott]

Yeah, VB lets you put a 16x16 icon to the left of button text, it lets you 
create buttons that have the little "drop-down" arrow to the right for menus 
or palettes, it has properties for whether the button appears in a menu 
strip, whether the cursor assumes a special shape when over it... it is part 
of the whole "Visual Studio 2005" family, which as you might expect is a 
stickler for representing Windows UI.

Just to give you an idea of what can be done with a "simple" button in VBE, 
I've captured the fully expanded button properties list and assembled it 
into a single image:

http://www.wjm.org/linked/buttons/vbebuttonprops.jpg

(It is bigger than will fit in a browser window, so be sure to hover over 
the pic with your mouse button and click the little expansion icon that 
appears after a delay, at the lower-right.)

Comments on the properties list: I prefer the way that Rev separates out the 
properties (instead of one long list like this), but I'd rather they used 
tabs instead of a drop-down menu for the various categories. Note that the 
very bottom of the VBE list shows a description of what the property does, 
which I think is better than a tooltip. Not that in the grid, clicking into 
the right column will show drop-down menus, color pickers, [...] icons which 
lead to supplemental dialogs... which is very self-documenting. For example, 
if I select something that binds it to a database, I'll get a little wizard 
to connect to my datasource, if one isn't already defined.

Bill

Chipp Walters wrote
> Does VB allow one to add icons and change the font and font size of a 
> button like this? Just wondering.