The Office Assistant package contains two components with the purpose of adding animated characters and balloons like the Microsoft^® Office applications to programs written in Delphi.

TAssistant is one of the components in the Office Assistant package, which is a non-visual component. This component provides a stage (either floating or fixed) for the loaded animated character (actor) into the component. In addition, this component has some properties and methods for showing standard dialogs (balloon shape) like message boxes, hints, tips, and search. The main features of the TAssistant component are:

• Ability to replace the active actor dynamically.
• Has integrated balloon tips for showing tip of the day or any other tips.
  
• Powered by a guide (search) balloon to accept the users search requests and show the topics of the search result.
  
• Has integrated balloon shape message box with customizable icon.
  
• Has both round and rectangular cloud balloons.
  
• Can manipulate custom balloons.
  
• Uses separated threads for handling the actor's states.
  
• Can be moved (dragged) even when a modal balloon/dialog is showing.
• A specific queued or playing animation can be stopped within the program.
  
• Has three level of predefined idling animations.
  
• Plays idle animations automatically. Idle times can also be controlled manually.
  
• Supports Middle Eastern languages and can be customized easily for use in multi-lingual applications.
  
• Powered by a large collection of events to give complete control over the component operation.
  
• The relative speed of animations can be controlled within the component.
  
• Can play actor's animations in a 256-color screen mode without loosing color quality.
  
• Supports both Microsoft^® Office 97 and 2000 balloons look.

TOffice97Button is the other component in the Office Assistant package. This component is a fully customizable button control that looks like the Microsoft^® Office (both 97 and 2000) button controls (button, radio buttons, up buttons and down buttons). Thanks to Jonathan Hosking for writing such a nice component.

To use Assistant in your application, you need to download at least one Actor Library. Each actor library contains a definition of one of assistant's actors. You can create your own actor by using Actor Editor.

If you are interested in having your own custom actor, you may wish to contact Safak Cinar. He is a talented animation creator (click here).

Because actor libraries are DLL resources, you can use an exe compressor to compress them. Of course, a compressed actor library will load slower into Office Assistant components. ASPack is one of the exe compressors that has been tested for compressing actor libraries and works great. Thanks to Bill Miller. You can contact Bill for information about compressing actor libraries.

The Assistant component contains some text that is used in predefined balloons of the component. If you are going to use TAssistant in an application with a non English user interface, you will need to edit the file oaConst.pas to change text captions. String constants in oaConst.pas are not read-only and can be changed even at run-time. At the download section of this page you can find some translations for oaConst.pas in different languages.

Finally, I have to mention that using Microsoft^® Agent characters provided by Microsoft as an actor library is not legal (click here).

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If you have used the Office Assistant Package in your product, and you would like your product to be listed here, please send a link to your application's homepage and a brief description about it to me via e-mail.