Arcadia PowerButton

“Excellent controls...PowerButton certainly lives up to its name and is incredibly flexible in the effects that can be achieved”

Paul Tweddell, Development Manager, CCTV Software

Shapes

Spice up your applications look with Arcadia PowerButton's new built-in shapes along with the rich variety of gradient effects.  You no longer need to spend a long time creating and modifying commonly used graphical shapes to integrate them in your application as buttons. With PowerButton shapes, you can create true buttons that can be rounded, capsule, diamond, and the standard rectangle shape.

Corners Rounding
& Slanting Appearance

Add a stylish touch to your application with Arcadia PowerButton's corners rounding
and slanting look.  Each style includes three levels with the ability to assign a different style and level for each of the four corners of the PowerButton object.

Integrated Button Shapes

Corners Rounding & Slanting

Appearances & Styles

Appearances & Styles

Arcadia PowerButton now comes with built-in Vista appearance style with the ability to apply this appearance with any of your favorite colors of choice. In addition to the Vista look, Arcadia PowerButton comes with several built-in appearances and styles, including XP, Office 2003, 3D, Flat, Bevel, CoolButton, XP When Mouse Over, and 3D When Mouse Over.  All These appearances can be applied under Windows 98, Me,
NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and Vista.

Glow, Animation, Marquee

Improve your user's interaction experience with your application using Arcadia PowerButton's new built-in Vista style glow, GIF animation, and marquee effects.  The glow effect enables you to choose different colors for the inner and outer glow, set inner glow placement, and apply a glow fading animation effect. You can also embed animated GIF pictures into PowerButton under default, mouse in, button down, and disabled states.  As for the marquee effects, PowerButton provides you with Scroll, slide, and alternate marquee behaviors combined with scrolling direction, amount and delay.

Translucency
& Transparency

With Arcadia PowerButton, you can set full button translucency or background only with the option to set different translucency levels all the way from opaque to transparent.  You can also create a transparent shaped button by selecting the most suitable built-in button shape that matches the picture boundaries you would like to place it over, and then setting the background to full transparency with the option to keeping caption or picture visible.

Gradient Color Generator

Arcadia PowerButton comes with advanced built-in gradient color effect generator. You can generate Vista style, horizontal, vertical, diagonal up, diagonal down, corner, and XP (style 1 and 2) gradients with four variants for each gradient.  Gradients with their associated variants can be applied on all available PowerButton states, including default state, when mouse pointer moves over the button, when button is pressed, and when button is disabled.  Arcadia PowerButton easy to use gradient color generator gives you the flexibility and freedom to elevate your application's interface to new heights.

Caption Styles & Effects

Arcadia PowerButton now comes with advanced method that enables you to modify the font style of every character in your caption, thus helping you add new glimmer to your interface presentation.  You can also polish the caption appearance of your buttons with the new Caption Effects property, where you can apply a shadow, engrave, or emboss touch to your caption final look.

Pinpoint Caption
& Picture Positioning

Arcadia PowerButton provides you with advanced independent caption and picture positioning features that includes horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, and left, top, right, and bottom margin setting.

Picture Effects

Arcadia PowerButton enables you to apply different picture effects, such as pop-up picture, lighter picture coloring, and dark picture coloring, under different conditions, including when the button is pressed, is disabled, and when the mouse pointer moves over the button.

Sound Effects

Arcadia PowerButton provides you with built-in sound effects that can be triggered when the mouse moves over the button or when it is pressed. You can also embed your own custom sound effects.

Button Toggling

Arcadia PowerButton can function as a toggle button. You can apply toggling functionality under all appearances with the ability to customize the background and border colors under Flat appearance mode. You can also assign a hyperlink address and display it or keep it hidden while maintaining the functionality of the hyperlink.

Hyperlink Enabled

You can assign a hyperlink URL to Arcadia PowerButton caption and display it or keep it hidden while maintaining the functionality of the hyperlink.

Built-in Drop Menu
with Shortcut Keys Localization

Arcadia PowerButton built-in drop menu feature enables you to build bi-directional multilevel menus with rich features, such as the ability to assign any desired font, assign pictures to menu items, insert separator lines, show a sidebar with your preferred color, customize the item selection bar background and foreground colors, assign shortcuts with localization option and assign hyperlinks to menu items.

New in Version 4

NEW in 4.5 Built-in Vista appearance

NEW in 4.5 Customizable Vista gradient effect

NEW in 4.5 Vista style glow effect with animation option and customizable inner and outer glow color with inner glow placement option

NEW in 4.5 Microsoft Access Compatible

Built-in rectangle, rounded, diamond, and capsule shapes

Multi-level corners slanting styling under flat appearance mode and a new rounding level

Ability to embed GIF animation pictures under different states

Built-in Marquee effects, including Scroll, Alternate, and Slide behavior and direction control

advanced method for applying different font styles and sizes for the same caption

Anti-aliased corner rounding effect under XP appearance for enhanced graphical presentation

Ability to save properties values in templates, including pictures and sounds

Compatibility

User Interface Features

Built-in Windows XP, Office 2003, 3D, Flat, Bevel, CoolButton, XP When Mouse Over, and 3D When Mouse Over appearances and styles that can be applied under Windows 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and Vista

Multi-level corners rounding styling under flat appearance mode

Various border styles

Built-in gradient color generator with many styles and variants

Highly customizable font setting and picture assignment under different states including when button is pressed and disabled, and when the mouse pointer moves over the button object

Button translucency and translucency level setting for the entire button object or the button background only

Pop-up, lighter and darker coloring picture effect options when the mouse moves over the button or when it is pressed

Pinpoint positioning accuracy by applying separate horizontal and vertical alignments and margin settings for pictures and captions

Functionality Features

Bi-directional

Create menu bar behavior by assigning group names to Arcadia PowerButtons collections

Shortcut keys localization for menu items

Run-time menu items manipulation

Built-in multi-level bi-directional drop menu with pictures and separator lines assignment capability

Auto XP color scheme detection and applying

Built-in sound effects option when the mouse moves over the button or when the button is pressed with ability to embed custom sounds

Button Toggling

Caption Wrapping

Hyperlink Enabled

Shortcut assignment to menu items

Hyperlink assignment to menu items

Ability to control at run-time the level of click actions, such as event and hyperlink launching