Following on from the last newsletter, I have been looking around for other DHTML tools that would be good foundations for sophisticated Web application. Last time I looked at a windows manager (it is really hard to type "windows" without capitalizing the W!) and this time I have a really powerful menu subsystem written in pure DHTL.
Published by NavSurf (see editorial links below), ACEMenu is an all-singing, all-dancing menu generator and presentation system.
ACEMenu can create vertical, horizontal, static, or floating menus with background images. Menu items can combine text and images and images can have rollover effects applied. You can also set the border, padding, font sizes, and styles applied to the item text.
The ACEMenu menus also operate cross-browser and NavSurf claims compatibility with IE Explorer 5.x+, Netscape 4.06+, Opera 6.x+ and 7.x, Mozilla 1.x, Konqueror 2.x and 3.x, FireFox, Galeon, and Safari.
A really powerful feature is that you can create menus without programming using the included menu builder software (which requires the Visual Basic 6.0 SP5 Run-Time Libraries solely for menu development) and when you've configured your menu, ACEMenu will add the code directly to the HTML files that the menu will be used in. About as painless as it gets.
There's even an add-in for Microsoft FrontPage called AceMenu Integrator that integrates ACEMenu into FrontPage Web projects and by using server-side Active Server Page scripting you can create dynamic ACEMenu configurations.
I tried creating a couple of menus and it really is easy. At $49.95 ACEMenu is also easily afforded and NavSurf includes free technical and setup support.