Ribbon Control
Ribbon Control is a tabbed toolbar that was first introduced with Microsoft Office 2007. Many .NET projects exist, this has been built from scratch in pure RealBasic code.
Design goals
Design
1The Ribbon is used in Microsoft Office on different platforms and with different styles. To enable consistency with the end-user's environment and also enabling custom design, the Ribbon control for RealBasic comes with 7 different themes:
- Office 2007, 2010, 2013
- Office 2011
- Mac OS style
- Windows 7 & 8
User experience
2Jacob Nielsen once said that most users prefer the programs that look just like Word, Excel or Powerpoint. People use Microsoft Office every day. Providing visual consistency with the Office and Windows Ribbon is very important because people know what to expect from a ribbon-like interface.
The elements on the Ribbon are resized according to the available space in the window. This key feature of the Ribbon tries to bring all possible commands to the screen by resizing them.
Performance
3Moving the mouse around the Ribbon will only redraw the necessary items leading to very low refresh times. The Ribbon was tested on high-end desktop computers as well as low powered Intel Atom netbooks.
The resizing process has also been optimized for a great user experience.
Quick Guide
The Ribbon Control is composed by three kind of elements, the tabs, the sections on the tabs and the items inside the sections.
The elements on the Ribbon are resized according to the available space in the window. This is a key feature of the Ribbon. It tries to bring all possible commands to the screen by resizing them, instead of hiding them.
Different Tab size, different section size
The Ribbon Control automatically resizes the buttons following the priority given by the developer to each section. Buttons are either displayed as normal or horizontal. When no more space is available, sections are collapsed and displayed as an "overflow" element.RibbonButtons can be displayed as a regular pushbutton or can be appended a menu that will popup when clicking on it.
The Ribbon includes customized tooltips that can accept pictures.
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