Configuring DragStrip for Windows

You can access the Strip Properties dialog from the contextual menu. Right click anywhere in the strip or click the menu button (upside down triangle), then choose "Strip Properties..." The Strip Properties dialog lets you configure how the strip looks and behaves.

Clicking the Cancel button exits Strip Properties without saving your changes. Clicking the OK button exits the dialog and saves your changes. Clicking Apply will apply your changes without closing the dialog.

Icon Style

You can change the style of the strip by choosing one of the strip styles from the combo box. Click here to see what the different strip styles look like.

Choose Font

To change the font that is used for button names and tabs, click the Choose Font button, then select the font, style and size that you want to use.

Show status bar

The status bar is a strip along the bottom of a DragStrip window which will show you the name of the item that the mouse is currently over.

Show tool tips

Tool tips are the little windows that appear over a button when the most hovers over it for a little while. You can choose to show or not show tool tips with this checkbox. Usually, you do not need to have both tool tips and the status bar on at the same time.

Show titlebar

The title bar is the top part of the window where the name of the window and the close box are. If you are trying to conserve space with your strips, you can turn off the titlebar. If you are trying to make a tall narrow strip, you might also want to turn this off since the strip has to be a certain width if the title bar is on. If you want to move the window when the title bar is hidden, just hold down the Alt and Control keys and click and drag anywhere in the window.

Show page tabs

You can show or hide the tabs that let you swich between pages. Since you can switch between pages with the Control-tab and Control-shift-tab keystrokes, you might want to hide the tabs to save space. You can also put the tabs on the top or the bottom of the strip. You might want to put the tabs on the bottom if you keep you strip close to the bottom of the screen.

Auto hide

When auto hide is enabled, your strip will shrink to a very small strip unless it is the active window, or the cursor is over any part of the strip. This can help you save screen space when you are not using your strip, while making it very simple to still get to all of your shortcuts. See the Strip Tip below.

Click to show

By default, when a strip is set to auto hide, you only need to move your cursor over the strip to make it expand to its full size. Sometimes, though, this is inconvenient and you might want to keep it auto hidden until you click on it. This checkbox turns on that ability. When Auto hide and Click to show are both turned on, you need to either click in an auto hidden window to expand it or make it the active window.

Always on top

When always on top is enabled, your strip will float above all other windows. This means that it will cover other windows, possibly including the window you are working in. This function works particularly well when combined with auto hide.

*Strip Tip

Show status bar	Off
Show tool tips	On
Show title bar	Off
Show page tabs	On
Auto hide	On
Always on top	On

Now hold down Alt and Control to drag your strip until it is up at the top edge of the screen. When you get close to the edge, the strip will jump to the edge, as if it was a magnet. Finally, resize the strip so that it is only one or two buttons high, but the full width of the screen. Now when you move your cursor away from the strip or click on a different window, the strip will shring itself to be only a couple of pixels high, but when you move the cursor so that it is over the strip, it will pop down so you can access it.

Buttons

Button Style

You can choose between any of the button styles on a strip. A button style determines how each button on a strip looks. Click here to see all of the different button styles.

Button Size

Some button styles allow you to configure the width and height of the button. You can drag the two sliders to determine the width and height and the picture of the button will be updated while you are dragging to show you what a typical button will look like. The Variable icon style is particularly flexible in that it can be resized both horizontally and vertically. This table shows you which icon styles can be resized and in which directions.

	Horizontal	Vertical
Large Icon	Fixed	Fixed
Small Icon	Fixed	Fixed
Large Icon with Name	Variable	Fixed
Small Icon with Name	Variable	Fixed
Variable	Variable	Variable

Other

Double click to open items

If you are used to having to double click to open files, you might want to turn this option on. When it is enabled, the first click on a button selects it and the second click actually opens it.

Allow icon dragging

You can disable the ability to drag an icon around on a strip or between strips. This is handy if you sometimes find yourself accidentally clicking and dragging an item when you just mean to click it to open it. If you want to rearrange items on a strip, you can just turn this option back off and then drag and drop to your heart's content.

Draw page tabs in bold font

You can choose to have the page tabs drawn in either a bold (heavy) font or a normal font.

Play click sound

You can turn on or off the click sound that is made when you click on a button with this option.

Strip hotkey

You can set a hot key that allows you to immediately bring this strip to the front. Configure the hotkey by clicking into the edit box labeled Strip Hotkey, then type the keystroke you want to use to activate the strip. If you want to get rid of a hotkey that you have set, just type the delete key. Hotkeys are a very handy way of bringing your strip to the front if it is not always on top, or activating it if it is set to auto hide and it is currently hidden. When you bring it to the front with a hot key, you can then use the arrow keys and tab key to navigate around the items on the strip.

You can access the Page Properties dialog from the contextual menu. Right click anywhere in the strip or click the menu button (upside down triangle), then choose "Page Properties..." The Page Properties dialog lets you configure the name and appearance of a page and what kind of items appear on that page.

Clicking the Cancel button exits Page Properties without saving your changes. Clicking the OK button exits the dialog and saves your changes. Clicking Apply will apply your changes without closing the dialog.

Page name

You can change the name of the page. This is the name that appears in the page tab. A page can be up to 32 characters long.

Set Page Color

Click this button to open the Windows color picker dialog. From this dialog, you can choose the color that will be used to draw the page tab and the buttons on that page. The current color is shown in the box to the right of the button.

Set Text Color

Click this button to open the Windows color picker dialog. From this dialog, you can choose the color that will be used to draw the page name and the names of all of the button on the strip. The current text color is shown in the box to the right of the button. It is a good idea to choose a color combination so that you can read the text on the chosen background color. You can try out color combinations by clicking on the Apply button to and looking at your strip to see how the current combination looks.

Display background pattern

You can choose a bitmap (*.bmp) file to display behind the buttons on a page. The bitmap is tiled behind the buttons. Click this checkbox to enable the Set Page Pattern button and allow a background pattern to be displayed on this page.

Set Page Pattern

*Strip Tip

It is a good idea to choose a page color that is similar to the colors in your chosen page pattern. This will help you associate the page with the tab by its color. If the pattern you choose has a lot of dark color in it, you may also want to choose a light text color so that you can still read the names of the items on your buttons.

Display task window buttons

DragStrip pages actually come in two varieties. The first variety is the standard button page. This is what most of your pages will be. On standard button pages, you can drag files, folders, URLs, etc onto buttons and they will stay where you put them. Clicking on these buttons opens the associated item. You can also create a task window page which automatically fills itself with a button for each top level window that is open at that time on your system. As you open and close applications and documents, the buttons on your strip will automatically be updated to show you the current windows that are open at that time. This behavior us a lot like the buttons that show up on the Windows Taskbar. If you click on one of these buttons, the associated window will be brought to the front.

Turning on the "Display task window buttons" checkbox makes the current page a task window page. You cannot put your own items on a task window page, since it is automatically maintained by DragStrip, so if you already have some items on this page, you will be asked if it is alright to remove those items before the page is turned into a task items page. To turn a task items page back into a standard page, just turn this option off.

You can access the Button Properties dialog from the contextual menu. Right click anywhere in the strip or click the menu button (upside down triangle), then choose "Button Properties..." The Button Properties dialog lets you configure the name and colors of a page and what kinf of items appear on that page.

Clicking the Cancel button exits Button Properties without saving your changes. Clicking the OK button exits the dialog and saves your changes. Clicking Apply will apply your changes without closing the dialog.

Name

You can change the name of the item. This is the name that shows up in the button and the tool tips.

Path

This is the path for a file item or a URL. For many items that are dragged to the strip, this field cannot be edited, but for file items or URLs that you add, you can change the path.

Parameters

When you add an application to a strip, the application might be able to take command line parameters to make it do interesting thing. For example, if you launch the Windows Address Book with the /find parameter, it will launch in a special mode called "Find People", where you can do searches for people on the Internet. If you wanted to do this, you could create a shortcut to the Windows Address Book by dragging its application to the strip, then choose Button Options and enter /find in the Parameters field. The next time you click that link, it will start in the Find People dialog.

Start In

Some applications like to have their default directory set when the application is started. If you would like to configure a specific directory to be passed to the application, enter it here.

Hotkey

You can set a hotkey that when hit will open the shortcut that it is associated with. For example, you might launch your E-mail client a lot and rather than having to bring your strip to the front and click on the item, you can just set a hotkey for that item and hit that hotkey from any application. Configure the hotkey by clicking into the edit box labeled Strip Hotkey, then type the keystroke you want to use to activate the strip. If you want to get rid of a hotkey that you have set, just type the delete key.

DragStrip's menus let you perform operations on the current strip such as saving or opening strips, editing the contents of strip, or configuring options such as icon or button style. This section will describe the DragStrip menus in detail.

You can get to DragStrip's menu several ways. The simplest way is to click the menu button, which is the downward facing triangle in the same area as the page tabs. Sometimes this is not convenient, though, like when you have page tabs hidden and you can't see the menu button. In this case, you can also right click anywhere in the strip window to bring up the DragStrip menu. Finally, if your computer's keyboard has a contextual menu key on it, you can press that key when a DragStrip is the frontmost window and the DragStrip menu will appear.

New

This option will open a new strip window which you can configure any way you want. Once you create a new window, you will need to save it if you want to be able to use it again after closing that window or exiting DragStrip.

Open

Opens the standard Windows open file dialog. You can navigate your hard drives looking for strip files that you have already saved. Selecting on and choosing the Open button in the dialog will open that strip in DragStrip.

Save

Saves changes to the current strip. Strip are automatically saved when you exit DragStrip, but if you have just made a lot of changes to your strips, it is a good idea to save them manually.

Save As...

Opens the standard Windows save file dialog. You can use this to save a copy of your strip to a different file or to save your strip for the first time, if it has never been saved.

Closes the current DragStrip window. This will only exit DragStrip if this is the last strip that you have open. If you want to close all of the strips at once, you should choose Exit instead of File->Close.

The Edit menu contains the standard clipboard menu items for moving items between strips or deleting items.

Cut

Moves the currently selected items to the DragStrip clipboard and removes the items from the strip.

Copy

Copies the currently selected items to the DragStrip clipboard and leaves them in their current location on the strip.

Paste

Copies items from the clipboard and adds them to the new strip at the first empty location. The items that are one the clipboard are still there.

Delete

Deletes the currently selected items from the strip. If the currently selected items are on a task windows page, then the windows that they are associated with are sent the close message which, in most cases, will close the windows and remove the items from the strip. Note that the delete operation cannot be undone.

The Selected Item Menu

This menu contains commands that apply to the currently selected button. The contents of this sub menu changes depending on the type of item you have selected and the shell extensions installed on your computer. The actual menu name is the name of the selected item. Some of the menu items that are often in this menu include:

Open

Explore

Opens an Explorer window and shows the selected items in it. This only applies to items that are available on disks. It does not apply to URLs.

Open Containing Folder

Opens a browser window to display the folder that contains the item. For example, if you opened the containing folder of an item at C:\Program Files\DragStrip, you would see a browser window of the C:\Program Files directory.

Properties

Opens the properties window for the item. This is different from the Button Properties in that it doesn't show the properties for the DragStrip button, but for the item that the DragStrip button "points" to.

Cut, Copy, Delete

Generally you add items to a strip by dragging them from a browser window or an explorer window. Sometimes, though, it is more convenient to just add a button and configure its properties manually. DragStrip 3.6 added several new button types which can only be added with this menu. Some of these new buttons are only available with certain versions of Windows.

File Button

Adding a new file button presents the Button Properties dialog where you can set the path to the file and the name that will appear on the button.

URL Button

Adding a new URL button presents the Button Properties dialog where you can enter the URL that you want to access and the name that will appear on the button.

Run...

Adds a button that shows the Windows Run dialog when clicked. The Run dialog lets you launch an applications or open a URL by typing its name or path.

Find File/Folder

Brings up the Find File/Folder dialog so you can search for files or folders on your computer

Find Computer

Brings up the Find Computer dialog so you can search for a computer on your network.

Task Manager

Brings up the Task Manager applications which lets you monitor how your computer's resources are being used.

Minimize All

Minimizes all open windows. This is a quick way to get to a file that is sitting on your desktop, but obscured by a bunch of open windows.

Logoff

Suspend

If your computer is capable of going into a suspended mode, this button will activate the suspended mode. This is usually available on laptop computers.

Shutdown Windows

Clock

The clock button shows you the current time of day. If you click on the clock button, it will let you set the current date and time on your computer. Choosing Button Properties for the clock displays the Clock Properties dialog which allows you to set how the time is displayed on the button.

Calendar

The calendar button shows you the current date. If you click on the calendar button, it will open a window with a calendar in it, you can change the month and/or year that the calendar displays. This is a handy way to quickly check for dates.

You can change the look of the buttons that appear on your strip. There are several types to choose from, including Raised, Double Raised, Beveled and None. Click here to see a examples of the different button styles.

This menu lets you change the icon style immediately without having to go to the Strip Properties dialog. Click here to see a examples of the different icon styles.

DragStrip comes with several predefined strip styles. Styles are groups of settings that are remembered and can be applied to other strips. The "Default" style is the one that is used whenever you create a new strip. You can create other styles based on the settings in a strip by selecting "Create Style From Current Strip...". You can apply a style to any strip by selecting that style's name from the Strip Styles submenu. If you hold down the option key, you will apply all of the stored strip settings for that style. Without the option key, DragStrip only applies color information.

You can redefine the "Default" style by creating another style called "Default". This way, you can set a strip up the way you like it then create a style called "Default" and all new strips will then appear just how you configured them.

Strips can be broken down into multiple pages. Each page has its own page color and can contain as many items as the strip can hold. Pages are a great way of organizing your strips based on the projects you are working on or the applications you use frequently. When page tabs are visible, you will see the page's name in a tab along one edge of the strip. Page tabs can be drawn along the top or bottom of the strip, or they can be hidden entirely. Even when page tabs are hidden, you can switch between pages by pressing the tab key or the shift-tab key combination.

Add Page

Add Page allows you to add a new page to the strip. Selecting this item will create the new page, then immediately open the Page Properties dialog for that page where you can set the page name and colors.

Delete Current Page

Delete Current Page will delete the active page and all of the items on it. You will be asked to confirm that you really want to do this before the deletion takes place.

Shift Current Page Left

Shift Current Page Left will move the currently selected page one page to the left. Basically, it will swap locations with the page tab that is to its left. This item is dimmed and unavailable if the current page is the first page.

Shift Current Page Right

Shift Current Page Right will move the currently selected page one page to the right. Basically, it will swap locations with the page tab that is to its right. This item is dimmed and unavailable if the current page is the last page.

There are several resources available on the Internet to help you use DragStrip. Links to those resources are available in this menu

DragStrip Home Page

The home page of DragStrip. Here you will find the latest information about DragStrip for the Mac and for Windows including news and update information.

Poppybank Software

On-line Documentation

The on-line documentation link takes you to the on-line version of this documentation.

Takes you to the on-line registration site for DragStrip. If you like DragStrip and plan to keep it, please register to help us continue to improve the product.

Tip of the Day

Opens the DragStrip Tip of the Day window. This is how you can get back to the tips, even if you turned them off at startup.

DragStrip has several other menu items that are available at the top level of the DragStrip menu.

Button Properties

This menu item will open the Button Properties dialog for the currently selected item. It is not available if there are no currently selected items or if the currently selected item is an item from a tasks list page. If you have multiple items selected, you will only get the Button Properties dialog for the first one that is selected.

Page Properties

This menu item will open the Page Properties dialog for the currently selected page.

Strip Properties

About DragStrip

This menu item opens the DragStrip about box. The DragStrip about box will tell you which version of DragStrip your are running and it is also where you can go to enter your DragStrip registration information once you have registered DragStrip.

Exit

When you choose Exit, DragStrip will remember which strips are currently open so that they can be automatically opened the next time you start DragStrip. Then it will close all of the currently opened strips and exit.