User Guide > Working with objects and properties > Types of objects > Visual objects

Visual objects are objects displayed on the screen of your application. It is visual objects that shape the application built in Autoplay Menu Designer and give it appearance and style.

Autoplay Menu Designer allows you to use the following visual objects in your project:

Shapes

[] Line/Polyline, [] Rectangle, [] Ellipse, [] Curve – objects drawing corresponding graphical primitives. You can use them to style and garnish your application.

Text & Graphics

[] Simple Text – the object displays simple multi-line text. This object is intended to display labels, descriptions and titles.

[] Formatted Text, [] Formatted Text Box – objects displays multi-line text with varying formatting including fonts, styles, colors, alignment. This object is intended to display large portions of formatted texts.

[] Cool Text – the tool creates one-line texts with additional effects like shadows, textures, text transformation and transparency. Cool Text is the best for titles, captions and one-line labels.

[] Graphic Button – an interactive object that functions as a button. The Graphic Button tool allows rich customization of visual appearance of the button, providing an ability to create virtually any type of graphics for your controls including shadows, color and gradient fills, textures, various shapes of the button and more.

Note: the Graphic Button with the background switched off can be used to display simple texts or one-line text links.

[] Image – the image object shows a graphic file of one of the supported formats. You can use images to build a background of your application, or to display various graphics elements, for example, logo, screenshots, diagrams, pictures and so on.

[] - Animated GIF - along with static images, you can also place animated GIFs to any window of your application. The list of possible uses is limitless: animated diagrams and graphs, simple cartoons, animated instructions, animated characters.

[] Hot Area. This object also called visual, but in fact it does not have an appropriate visual representation in the run-time. The purpose of the Hot Area object is to provide response to user’s action by means of assigning events and actions to it. For instance, using Hot Area you can create pop-up tooltips, make the main window moveable or perform any other actions the program supports. Since Hot Area does not display anything, it is convenient if you want to execute the same action regardless of objects underlying the area.

Controls

[] Standard Button. This object acts like any other button you could have seen in any other application. A user can press a button with mouse and trigger certain activity of the application, like opening dialogs, running programs, switching to other windows or pages and so on.

[] Checkbox. A checkbox is used to offer multiple selection capabilities in the application. It works the same way as checkboxes in typical software products.

[] Radio Button. The object is used to provide a user the choice between several mutually exclusive yet related options.

[] Edit Box. This tool allows a user to input text data, like names, addresses, comments, registration keys or passwords.

[] List Box. A list box is a graphical control element that allows the user to select one or more items from a list contained within a static, multiple line text box.

[] Combo Box. A combo box is a combination of a drop-down list box and a single-line editable textbox, allowing the user to either select one value from a list or type a value directly.

Embedded players and viewers

This type of visual objects is embedded controls providing some additional functions to your application. These are:

[] Subwindow. A window object that contains other pages and objects.

[]GridView. A GridView is designed to represent various data as a structured view.

[] Web Browser. An embedded browser window that can display web content from a provided URL or a local page.

[] Media Player shows all kinds of supported media content: video, music, DVD/BluRay and so on. Note that the system the application will be running at must have all codecs required for the playback.

[] Flash Player plays SWF (Adobe Flash) files.

[] RTF File Viewer. The object displays Rich Text documents in the read-only mode.

[] Plug-ins

Plug-ins are visual objects extending the functionality of your application beyond standard capabilities.  More details see Plug-ins.

All visual objects can be grouped together to become a single object you can edit as a whole. Properties set for a group are applied to every object of that group. The position and the size of grouped objects also modified as a single object. Aside from grouping, objects can be combined, which allows them to share actions and respond on them as one object - in contrast with a group, where objects remain individual and behave the same way.

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