Stretched rounded buttons

The code is basically an extension to the RoundButton class written by Chris Maunder. While his RoundButton is always circular, i have changed it such that it can have a flattened horizontal orientation. This combines Chris' beautiful round shading with the more space-efficient appearance of an ordinary rectangle button.

I decided to keep the RoundButton class instead of deriving yet another because i think that the added functionality is transparent enough. In the sense that the button defaults to exactly Chris' circular button when the button is designed square or vertical (say portrait) in the resources.

The only change applies to buttons that are designed non-square horizontal (say landscape) in the resources. In that case the button is stretched to fill the width of the button. And Chris' circular fragments are appended to the left and to the right sides.

In order to do this i split up Chris' DrawCircle function into a DrawCircleLeft and DrawCircleRight part. Each of which draws a shaded 180-degree angle. Then i added the functionality to draw horizontal lines between the left and right arcs to combine the arcs.

A minor change is in the LIGHT_SOURCE_ANGLE constant. When Chris' value of -2.356 is applied, the color of the highlited line (top line) of the stretched button is almost identical to the background color. And the line appears to be missing. By changing the angle of incoming light to -1.88 the top line has enough highlight to contrast with the background.

The new functionality has been added to both the 3d- and flat-type buttons.

I have also changed the text-drawing functionality to give it more of a 3d-look.

I did not implement the dotted focus for this new button because i did not need it myself. But it might be a good idea for another extension.

Chris' button does not support acceleration-underline. Neither does mine. This might also be a good extension.

I don't regard my code addition as highly elegant or intelligent. But it seems to work without problems in my application.

Last updated: 6 June 1998