CHoverButton – Nice Hover Button with One Bitmap and Tooltip.

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Looking around for some nice bitmap hoverbuttons, I just couldn’t find what I was looking for.
In this case there are a couple of things you can do:

1. Leave it.
   
2. Buy it.
   
3. Steal it.
   
4. Get it for free.
   
5. Start crying
   
6. Do it yourself (and possibly share it.)
   

I’ll share!

I found another hoverbutton class that uses SetCapture() and ReleaseCapture().
Using this method gives earlier or later some problems. I can’t remember why, but it
did to me. So I thought why do it so diffifcult? MS has a nice API to handle hoverstates:
_TrackMouseEvent().

So here it, the class. After a long thought i decided to call it: ‘CHoverButton’.
I used some classes and information found elsewhere on
CodeGuru (thanks to the people for that).

How to use it?

1. In you resource editor create a button and set the ‘owner draw’ property.
   
   
2. Use classwizard to create a CButton object in your dialog.
   
3. Include the “hoverbutton.h” file in your dialog class file.
   
4. Rename the ‘CButton’ object type to ‘CHoverButton’.
   
5. Create a bitmap with three buttonstates: Up/Down/Hover. The pictures need
   to be right next to each other.
   The button will calculate it’s own size (the width of the bitmap)/3.
   You can use true color bimaps here.
   
6. In the OnInitDialog() load the bitmap with mybutton.LoadBitmap(IDC_MYBUTTON);
   
7. Set a tooltip with mybutton.SetToolTipText();
   
8. Compile and watch.
   

Have fun!

Downloads

Download demo project with source – 34 Kb