Introduction
3D Active Button Magic (3DABM8U.OCX) is an ActiveX custom control, developed by MultiMedia Soft, that will give you the possibility to use a new "look & feel" 3D button control inside your applications; creating skinned applications using this control is really easy: every button you put on your forms or dialog boxes can use a variety of shapes, surfaces, special effects, textures, bitmaps, animations, sounds, colors and fonts.
The strength of this product is the fact that it doesn't make use of predefined bitmaps, created with expensive graphical applications, in order to render its surface: it calculates the 3D rendering of the surface using a proprietary algorithm whose quality cannot be found in any of the few competitors on the market: this will allow to save time and money each time you will have to make a customization of your applications; furthermore, thanks to the use of predefined "templates", you can change all the settings of a button with a single line of code during the application execution.
3D Active Button Magic is not only a simple button control but a suite of 8 different controls and can be used as an alternative to some standard Windows controls of common use: inside the
Tutorials section of this help file you will find a lot of tutorials that will help you getting the best from this product.
3D Active Button Magic is fully UNICODE compliant, so you will have the possibility to use it with the various languages (such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) that make use of double-byte characters.
3D Active Button Magic comes with 4 different editions, each tailored to the differing needs and budgets of software developers:
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Deluxe edition
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Contains the Professional edition of the control and the full version of our 3D Button Visual Editor application.
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Professional edition
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The full featured control.
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Standard edition
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A subset of the features available inside the Professional edition.
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Light edition
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A subset of the features available inside the Standard edition.
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The following chart provides a quick comparison overview of the features available inside the 4 different editions:
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Light
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Standard
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Professional
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Deluxe
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Buttons caching system
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Custom shaped buttons
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Pictures, textures and sounds support
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Surface coloring in different button states
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Multiple texts support (up to 9 at the same time)
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Cells support
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Support for Radio buttons and Checkboxes
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Download of sounds, pictures and animations from the Internet
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Anti-aliasing for button surface borders and texts
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New button surfaces (Aqua, Plastic, Gel, etc.)
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3D linear gradients
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Text effects: halo, transparency, double width, solid background, rotation angle
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Dedicated styles for Labels, Frames, Pictures, Enhanced Standard Radio buttons and Enhanced Standard Checkboxes
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Improved animations management
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Transparency support for button's surface, cells and pictures
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Full version of 3D Button Visual Editor
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Inside the documentation you will find the following sentences to understand if a feature is available or not in a certain edition:
(Available only with Professional edition): in this case the feature is available only in Professional and Deluxe editions.
(Not available with Light edition): in this case the feature is available only in Standard, Professional and Deluxe editions and not in Light edition.
If none of the previous sentences is specified, the feature is available inside all of the editions.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
For a best visualization of the control it is recommended the use of High Color or True Color monitor settings, i.e. at least 65536 colors.
