PBBalloon & PBTray was revolutionary and innovative when first released in 2002. Windows XP had just been released and everybody wanted to have XP-like application features, like balloons. PBBalloon & PBTray offered this benefit for any Windows versions, including Windows 95. It evolved from its first release into a powerful component with added features like links, tray icon location logic and tooltips support.
But not everything was happiness. Additional support for customizations of the balloon theme was a usual request we received, and the release of Windows Vista made this problem more visible. We also received requests to support richer message content, and support for rectangular and no tail (arrow) shapes.
Because of all this, we decided to revise the component for our next release. We went back to the basics and redesigned the component from scratch to keep the powerful features that identified PBBalloon & PBTray as the market leader while addressing the problems mentioned above. This new release also comes with a name change: PBMessageUI ActiveX Edition, which reflects the new support for additional shapes and message types.
The new component includes the following features that address the problems mentioned above:
- HTML support
We have added HTML support for the message title and message. You can use HTML tags in the content, and we even provide a simple object model if you don’t want write HTML directly. This implementation is NOT browser based so we can guarantee it will work correctly on any Windows operating system, indenpendently of any browser version installed.
- Theme support
We have added theme support. Themes define the message shape, the icons to use, and the general layout and colors for the message. We include by default implementations of 4 themes (Vista Balloon, XP Balloon, Vista Infotip and Office 2007 Infotip). The included themes are also customizable so you can modify them to fit your needs, and the model is so flexible, that we support custom themes created by you. Besides this, changing a message's theme is a one line change.
- Object Model improvements
We have improved our Object Model to support the new features and make the component better. We added new objects to create HTML content easily, improved the tooltip objects and managers and also improved the message objects (previously balloon object) to improve the developer experience in the component.
- Better Vista/Server 2008 and new x64 support
We have revised and fixed some issues when running under Windows Vista/Server 2008, and we have added support for x64 (WOW64) operating systems. This will guarantee that your application will behave correctly in virtually any Windows OS.
Click here to visit the webpage for PBMessageUI ActiveX Edition.