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The
Office Assistant package contains two components in purpose
of adding animated characters like office assistant characters
to Delphi applications.
TAssistant
is the main component in the Office Assistant package, which
is a non-visual component. This component provides
a floating stage 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 and tips, and search. Some major features
of TAssistant component are:
- Ability
to replace the active actor dynamically.
- Has
integrated tips balloon for showing tip of the day or any
other tips.
- Powered
by a guide (search) balloon to accept the user search requests
and showing the topics of the search result.
- Has
integrated balloon shape message box with customizable icon
- Has
got both round rectangular and cloud balloons.
- Can
manipulate custom balloons.
- Uses
a separated thread for playing animations.
- Can
be moved (dragged) even when a modal balloon is showing.
- Uses
a queue for waiting animations.
- A
specific queued or playing animation can be stopped within
the program.
- Has
three level of predefined idling animations.
- Plays
idle animations automatically. Of course, idle times also
can be controlled manually.
- Supports
Middle East languages and can be customized easily for use
in multi-lingual applications.
- Powered
by a large collection of events to give a complete control
over the component operation.
- It
is able to show animations with a transparent background
as well as using an image as background of the animation
stage.
-
Can show the actor as stretched with keeping the aspect
ratio of the original actor dimensions.
- The
speed of animations can be modified within the component.
- Can
play actor's animations in 256-color screen mode without
loosing color quality.
- Supports
both Microsoft® Office 97 and 2000 look balloons.
 The
other component in the Office Assistant package is TAssistantPanel.
As you can guess from its name, it is an assistant fixed on
a panel. The TAssistantPanel has all features of TAssistant
component except support for balloons.
For
using TAssistant or TAssistantPanel in your application, you
need to download at least one Actor
Library. Each actor library contains definition of one
assistant's actor. You can create your own actor by using
Actor Editor.
If
you are interested to have your own custom actor, maybe you
would like to contact to Safak
Cinar. He is a talented animation creator (click
here).
Because
actor libraries are resource DLL, you can use an exe compressor
to compress them. Of course, a compressed actor library loads
slower into Office Assistant components. ASPack
is one of exe compressors that has been tested for compressing
actor libraries and works great. Thanks to Bill
Miller for information about compressing actor libraries.
TAssistant
component contains some text that they have used in predefined
balloons of the component. If you are going to use TAssistant
in an application with none English user interface, you have
to edit file oaConst.pas to change text captions. String
constants in oaConst.pas are not read-only and can be change
even in run-time. On download section of this page you can
find some translations for oaConst.pas
in different languages.
Assistant's
balloons are powered by TOffice97Button
component, which is a fully customizable button control that
looks like Microsoft® Office (both 97 and 2000)
buttons. The Office Assistant package needs the latest
version of TOffice97Button
for being installed. Thanks to Jonathan
Hosking for writting such a nice component.
Finally,
I have to mention that using Microsoft® Agent characters
provided by Microsoft as actor library is not legal (click
here).
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