Upgrading to HyperActiveMenu Plus             

The expected upgrade path is from HyperActiveMenu Professional v2.x. For a simple switch from the Professional edition to Plus, the only required changes are as follows:

1. The Copyright parameter must be altered to that shown on the Getting Started page.

2. Names of URL and Target parameters must not end with the 'a', 'b', 'c' or 'd' suffix. With the introduction of Scripted Links in Cool Focus applets, support for multiple URLs from each menu entry is now unnecessary.

The majority of parameter names have been retained in Plus. A few have been removed (see below); those that remain will have the same effect in Plus as they have in Professional. By making the changes above, you should be able to replace your HyperPro program files with the new HyperPlus files and immediately use HyperActiveMenu Plus. But we hope you'll want to experiment with some of the new features below!

New Features in HyperActiveMenu Plus

  • The 25-entry limit on menus is removed.

  • The Arrows and StickyMenus parameters are now redundant. Arrows on buttons are replaced by the ButtonImages parameter. Buttons and main-menu entries are always 'sticky', but this stickiness can be overridden by setting LabelSelColor and EntrySelColor to match LabelColor and EntryColor.

  • Adding to the Professional edition's LabelAlign parameter, an EntryAlign parameter allows menu entries to be aligned to the left, center, or right. This also affects where submenus (a new feature in Plus) are positioned.

  • Each main-menu entry can optionally open a submenu of items instead of linking to a URL. The Entry, URL and Target parameters for a submenu entry work in a similar way to those for main-menu entries, with parameter names constructed as follows:

    A-B-EntryC
    where A is the number of the selected button, B is the number of the selected main-menu entry, and C is the number of the entry on that submenu.

  • Two new options allow you to choose whether buttons and main menus should be 3D: Button3D and Menu3D.

  • Four new parameters allow you to choose whether focused and selected entries should be drawn in bold text (effective only if your LabelFont and EntryFont are not already bold). The four parameters are LabelFocusBold, LabelStickyBold, EntryFocusBold and EntryStickyBold. An extra parameter, LabelSelReact, lets you choose whether selected buttons should still react as if unselected when the mouse passes over them, or ignore mouse movement.

  • HyperActiveMenu Plus's new animation can be fine-tuned using two parameters which work in combination, similar to two identically-named attributes of the HTML <MARQUEE> tag: ScrollAmount and ScrollDelay.

  • With the arrival of 3rd level menus (or 'submenus'), several options are added to change the way these are displayed. These are SubmenuOffset (horizontal positioning of submenus), SubmenuLowered (3D appearance of submenus), SubmenuButtonized (option to show reactive buttons on a lowered submenu), and UseDimmer (optionally dim all other text when a submenu is showing).

  • As in HyperActiveMenu Professional, separators (or 'spacers') can be placed on a main menu or submenu by entering &sp in place of a text caption for the entry. More intuitively, HyperActiveMenu Plus also allows you to enter a hyphen ( - ) to create a separator.

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