Rick Grehan
I am always happy to see new ways of telling a computer what to do without resorting to manual programming. But I'm leery of development systems that don't let you code. I'm forever nervous they'll stall on the steep ascent of a critical programming task.
SmartPad's Professional Edition
from SoftBlox (Atlanta, GA (404) 892-0202) lets you work without code if you wish or with code if you must.
SmartPad is a Windows' development system for building toolbars. You can then install your homemade toolbars wherever you want: out on the desktop or inside an application.
Of course, a toolbar is just a dialog with buttons, but SmartPad lets you build "smart" buttons. Tooltip-like titles you define automatically pop up a few seconds after you position your cursor over a button, and when you click on the right
mouse button, balloon help appears. The toolbars themselves also have smarts: They reorder buttons when you resize them, and they let you move buttons around inside the toolbar or from one toolbar to another.
A SmartPad button can trigger one of seven actions. Probably the most common use is to launch an application. You can also program a button so that clicking on it touches off a series of keystrokes, activates a menu command, or even unleashes a macro that can be a mix of keyboard and/or mouse events. You can use SmartPad's macro recorder from the desktop or from within applications. Macros with lots of mouse movements can consume lots of memory. Thankfully, SoftBlox's recorder lets you selectively disable mouse events.
A SoftBlox button can activate a DDE and (pacifying my nervousness) execute SoftBlox's SmartScript program. SmartScript is a programming language that looks so much like Visual Basic that, if you're familiar with one, you'll have no problem with the other. You can build di
alogs; perform user and file I/O; and in short, build your own suite of toolbar-activated miniapplications. Even better, you can use SmartScript as a vehicle for automating complex activities within existing applications.
The price of SmartPad Professional Edition is $295, although as you read this, SoftBlox is selling it for a promotional $199. The standard edition (which does not include SmartScript) is $99.
Caution: It's easy to overdo toolbars, and SmartPad's simplicity makes that likely. Already I find myself swamped in active Excel toolbars, with little room left for the spreadsheet, and I haven't even started making SmartPad toolbars for Excel yet.
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SmartPad lets you build and install your own toolbars.
Toolbars To Go
