CyLog Software Homepage ToolBox v2.84
Copyright ©1996-2009 CyLog Software
Introduction
Quick Guide
How To
   Shortcuts
   Control Panel
   ToolBox Properties
   Icon Properties
   Administration Tasks
   Troubleshooting
   
Where to find Icons?
Registration
License Agreement
Contact Us

How to use ToolBox - Shortcuts and Drive Monitors

You can create three different types of shortcuts in ToolBox.
Drive shortcuts that open a drive contents in Windows Explorer,
Application Shortcuts that can open an application, a simple file, or a folder,
Control Panel Application Shortcuts that can open a Windows CPL (Control Panel) application and
Drive Size Monitors that can show you the amount of free disk space on a particular disk at run-time and can be used to open the drive contents in Windows Explorer too.

Drive Shortcuts

Create a Drive Shortcut
Right click on an empty tile on your ToolBox window. Select 'New../Shortcut to Drive' from the popup menu (see picture on the right). The Icon Properties dialog will open (see Icon Properties Dialog picture). Select a drive letter and an Icon (you can choose to pick an icon from a different library) and click OK to create a shortcut to a Drive (see picture on the left).

Clicking on a Drive icon, executes Windows Explorer with the correct parameter, so a window with the contents of that drive is displayed.

Application Shortcuts

Drag & drop an executable onto ToolBox
From Windows Explorer navigate to a place where an executable (*.exe) file is on your disk. For example, if you want to create a shortcut to Notepad the windows default text-file editor, go to c:\winnt where the Notepad application is. Find the notepad.exe file, drag it and drop it onto your ToolBox window at any empty tile. This will create automatically a shortcut to Notepad, and you can use this tile to run Notepad from now on!

Drag & drop any file onto ToolBox
If you drag a simple file, like an excel-spreadsheet for example, onto an empty Toolbox tile, ToolBox will create a shortcut to that file, and will pick up the correct associated icon for that file (in our example the Microsoft Excel icon). By clicking that tile from now on, ToolBox will try to find and then execute the associated application.

Editing Shortcut Properties
For more information on editing Properties, refer to the Icon Properties page.

Windows CPL Application Shortcuts

Although ToolBox will correctly recognize and identify a Windows Control Panel application when a .cpl file is dropped on it, you can also right-click on an empty tile and select New->Shortcut to Control Panel Application from the pop-up menu.
This option will reveal a list of the Control Panel applications found in your Windows system directory (e.g. c:\winnt\system32). Pick up one of them and press OK to create a windows CPL application shortcut.

Note, that CPL applications that do not appear in the list (like Administrative Tools->Services) are not proper CPL files. These applications are most likely to be *.msc files, i.e. Windows Management Console applications. You can create shortcut to these snipets by creating normal shortcuts to .msc files (see creating Application Shortcuts).

Drive Size Monitors

Drive Size monitors are tiles that show you the free space on a hard disk.
Before creating a drive size monitor, it is a good idea to create a new toolbox, that has rectangular tiles (80x18 pixels probably). ToolBox's default windows have 36x36 sized tiles, which are fine when you want to accomodate simple icons, but drive size monitors are shown in text and need to be wider.

Create a Drive Size Monitor
Right-click on an empty tile in one of your ToolBox windows. Select New/Drive Size Monitor from the popup menu. Select the drive you want to monitor from the drop-down list and press ok. A new drive size monitor will be created as shown in the image below.

You can now change the toolbox window's properties and make it appear nicer and smaller. Note that the drive size monitor acts as a normal ToolBox button. The button shown in the example, will launch explorer and show the contents of the C: drive.



Creating a new shortcut using the pop-up menu.

Copyright ©1996-2009 CyLog Software    www.cylog.org