Staydown! Good Boy!

One of TouchPros niftier features is the ability to make a key appear to stay depressed without having to draw a new page or margin. Previously, it required having multiple pages and margins, which added to styling time and program complexity. You can now define any set of buttons as staydown buttons. Whenever one of these buttons is selected, the highlight will stay on until another staydown button is selected. The staydown buttons in the margin and on the page are considered two separate sets so, if both are defined, they will not interfere with each other. Additionally, you can define a default staydown button for each set. When the page or margin is first drawn, this zone will automatically have the highlight activated until another staydown button is selected.

[img:347s8s4o]http://www.possupport.net/dealer/kbase/images/staydown.gif[/img:347s8s4o]

Here’s How

  1. Select the beveled button tracking style by pressing Ctl-T until that style appears in the Editnet margin.
  2. Press Alt-A and select a color scheme. White or light text on a darker color works best.
  3. Define the zone normally. In zone properties press Alt-S to define it as a staydown button.
  4. Set the highlight attribute so that the foreground color matches the background color of the button. Make the highlight background color black (although picking another color can create some interesting effects). For example, if your button is white text on blue, make your highlight blue on black.
  5. Repeat for the remaining staydown buttons.
  6. Finish the rest of your styling normally, assigning commands to the zones and linking the page or margin into your program as needed.
  7. Define your default staydown button. First make a note of the zone number for that button. Then press Alt-Z to bring up your zone menu and select Default Staydown. Enter the zone number when prompted. Note that making new zones can cause the existing zones to be renumbered, so be careful here.

Really Cool Trick

Ok, you’re using the staydown feature and it’s working great, but your buttons are Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, and depending on the time of day, you would like the appropriate button to be highlighted when the page or margin is first displayed. How can you do that? Follow these steps:

  1.

      For each button, assign a unique key substitution character or number. You can do this in zone properties by pressing Alt-K, then the number you are assigning. This example will assume you have used the numbers 1, 2, and 3.
  2.

      Use a chain something like the following:

Page=Menu

Margin=Menu

If Dec Time<1100      ;If before 11 AM

Hot Key:49,0          ;Put a ‘1’ in the KB buffer

Stop-Ignore Rest!

End If

If Dec Time<1600      ;Otherwise, if before 4 PM

Hot Key:50,0          ;Put a ‘2’ in the KB buffer

Stop-Ignore Rest!

End If

Hot Key:51,0          ;Else put a ‘3’ in the KB buffer

The chain simulates the push of the keyboard key 1, 2, or 3 depending on the time of day. When the chain ends, TouchPro reads the keyboard buffer and thinks someone has pressed a key. Since there is a zone correlating to that key, the commands in it get executed, and the staydown feature gets triggered. Interestingly, the Stop-Ignore Rest command does not stop the subsequent chain from executing, because it occurs before TouchPro has processed the keystroke and added the new commands to the instruction queue.