Design Info for the Mystery Letter Software…
The Mystery Letter Writer was created with Instant Software Builder. To create software yourself with this program you only need to know how to create a webpage. The better you are with HTML and CSS, the more advanced your softwares will be. But you can already make some great stuff with little to no knowledge while making your pages in a program like FrontPage Express…
The software is a multi-screen project which uses about every trick in the book to display the screens as I want them to. Pay special attention to the second screen which you use for selecting the magic language, colors, size et cetera:
There are 3 question fields rendered invisible and the input is determined by the radio button you click. The corresponding questions are all on the left-hand side of the screen.
At the top you find a ‘Help!’ button which triggers an alert when clicked. That’s really easy to do yourself by the way. I hope you got yourself that free manual I made available recently, as this explains how to do it… If you haven’t got it yet, download it from:
http://www.programmersecretsrevealed.com
After you made your selection by pressing some radio buttons and specifying a color scheme, you can preview what it will look like:
The preview window is a custom textarea which uses the user settings to display the alphabet in their chosen language, size and colors.
And on the right-hand side you see the color picker returning. There’s something with this script which doesn’t make it insertable inside any other HTML page, so I have it as a separate HTML file and in the screen there’s an <iframe> tag which calls it in.
Because I wanted to make the software accessable off-line and because I needed to make sure the fonts were all installed on the user’s computer correctly, I created an installer file.
The default ISB installer is too simple, so I used Inno Setup instead (you can get a free download at http://www.jrsoftware.org)
After the first try-out I discovered the software hijacked my window. This is an ISB bug caused by the Extra Page option. Extra pages work fine as long as you don’t create installers for your software!
So I removed the extra page and added an info-only tag at the start of the recipe to display my message when the software opens only now inside of the application. Since I wanted a static page anyway, it’s fine for me as it is.
Oh, btw - when you run the software, you’ll find that you cannot return to the first screen. This is because I didn’t include a back button on screen 2. Of course ISB did its best to still add a back button, but that part I made nicely invisible as well…
Once satisfied, click ‘Save and Continue’ to go to the screen where you will write your actual letter:
After you’ve have done this, you can preview the final results from the last screen, save the letter as a webpage or print it out straight away…
The last screen is interesting too. It has customized output buttons inside of the wizbar. This allowed me to change the sequence of the buttons - the back button (’Change Style’) comes directly underneath the preview button and only after this are the save as HTML and print button.
It’s pretty easy to customize your buttons that way. You just write your own button script which has to include the ISB button ID’s. When you compile your program, deselect the output options (step so ISB won’t also create a button script.
The only button script which cannot be altered is the script for back and next buttons, but by putting them inside
I hope you’ll like this creation. Not so much a money maker, but certainly a fun tool to play with. My kids have already tried it and they think it’s way cool…
Have fun with it!
Patricia