Marketplace reviews
ActiveBar 2.0
James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- Conclusion
Introduction
A major disadvantage of using VB is that it is next to impossible to create dockable windows or menus like those in Office 2000. ActiveBar 2 is one solution which should make this process simple.
Many readers will have used the VB Accelerator Rebar control which is great for creating IE style toolbars, but still lacks features such as customization, animations, and docking. This control boasts a wide range of features, from a 'Unique interactive designer that works directly on your forms', which allows you to create menus, toolbars, tabbed toolbars, shortcut-bars and status bars. Toolbars and menus are dockable, floating, popup, fixed and detachable, and also features Office 2000 personalized menus, quick customization and flyout tools. However, does it match up to these wonderful claims?
A fully functional UI - in VB!
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A month ago I bought a version of ActiveBar 2.0 and I'm reasonably satisfied with it.
I also encountered various bugs in the development environment.
Despite this I already implemented the control in my product Site Skinner Pro You can see some nice screenshots here of what the control can do.
One thing I did not like was the ordering part of the control. When you look at the ActiveBar site you will see that it will cost you $189 but then when you are placing the order you will see a notification that shipping will costs $45. It was not clear to me if that applied to me. I only wanted to register so I hoped that they only send me a registration ID. Of course I had to pay it. Then 2 weeks after receiving the package I received an invoice from FedEx for about $46 taxes and $7 administration. So at the end I ended up paying almost $100 more than I intended.
A good (maybe even better?) alternative for ActiveBar is DockStudioXP and it only cost $129. If I had known that one before I might have bought that one. I do not have experience with it but you can give it a try.
This thread is for discussions of ActiveBar 2.0.