Upgrading to HotStrip Professional             

The expected upgrade path is from HotStrip (standard edition), version 2.0 or greater. This page explains the changes you'll have to make - and the additional options you can add - to web pages currently containing either of these HotStrip versions.

Required Changes

  • The APPLET CODE="ryHotStrip.class" must be changed to APPLET CODE="ryHotStripPro.class"

  • The required Copyright parameter should now read as follows:

    <param name=Copyright value="HotStrip Professional (c) 1998 Cool Focus [www.coolfocus.com]">
  • The BgImage (background image) parameter that was available in HotStrip standard edition is not supported in HotStrip Professional. The BgImage parameter will be ignored.

  • Minor layout and spacing changes have been made to this Professional edition which may have an impact on the way your existing HotStrip menus will look when you switch to HotStrip Pro. Be sure to check the appearance of your pages in the browsers that matter and, if necessary, adjust applet dimensions.

    New Features

  • The most noticeable new feature is horizontal scrolling. If the total width of entries on the menu is wider than the applet's width, HotStrip Professional will add scroll buttons to either end of the applet, allowing the entries to be scrolled back and forth. Entries will continue scrolling until either the button is released or the end of the menu is reached. You can adjust scrolling speed using the ScrollSpeed parameter. By default, the scroll buttons' colors will match your other chosen colors, but you can create your own 'look' using the new ScrollButtonColor, ScrollArrowColor and ScrollArrowLight parameters. The scroll buttons are fixed in size and position, but a FlatScrollButtons parameter lets you add a little extra reactivity to them. Although HotStrip standard edition theoretically supported unlimited entries, you were constrained by web page width. Using HotStrip Professional, it's now easy to display dozens of entries.

  • Less noticeable, but perhaps more important, HotStrip incorporates our Spytracking system to ensure that the correct menu entry is always highlighted, regardless of how visitors navigate your site.

  • Instead of displaying textual entries, HotStrip Professional can display clickable images on the menu. For each entry, a basic and a focussed/selected image will be displayed. To display images in place of text, include the new UseImages parameter with a value of 'yes', and enter the absolute or relative URLs of the images in the Entry parameters. See Using Images for more information.

  • In conjunction with the option to display images, two new parameters, UseImageHighlighter and UseImageSelecter, let you choose whether to display highlighting and selection boxes around images as the mouse passes over them or clicks them.

  • A new parameter, LineWidth, lets you choose the width of the scrolling lines (if you choose to display them).

  • A 3D border can be displayed around the edge of the menu using a simple ShowBorder parameter.


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