About two years ago, I reviewed a product called Action
Bars which enables you to create animated navigation bars for your web
pages. While creating nice looking navigation bars, it always bothered me that
it flashed a Java "Loading" message before the bar was actually
displayed. The slower your connection, the greater the delay in the appearance
of the navigation bar. So there is a need for a tool to create slick
navigation bars that don't add a lot of bandwidth overhead during page loads.
This is where Pop-Up Menu Creator comes in, and boy, is
it cool! With a few clicks, you can select the color of your navigation bar,
choose among several special effects (I like the XP menu-like button fades),
select either a vertical or horizontal menu structure, and then begin building
your menu structure.
You can use the built-in wizard to walk you through the entire
creation process, and it really is fairly easy to understand even without the
wizard.
After you select the basic settings to determine the look and
feel of the menu, you begin to apply titles to the buttons and page links. You
can even have nested menus.
You can preview your work in progress in real-time and make
adjustments quickly and easily. And you can even see it and test it in your
favorite browser. Remarkably, the menus should support virtually any type of
browser and operating system.
When your design is complete, all you do is click on the
Create Menu button and within seconds you are presented with some code to cut
and paste into your web pages, along with a list of files that must be copied
up to your web server to make the menu work properly. If you are hesitant to
add the code by yourself, Pop Up Menu Creator can even add the code for you!
One of the coolest features is the ability to create dynamic
menus that move down the page as you scroll or that can be dragged and dropped
anywhere on the page. This can be very useful on long web pages where the
navigation buttons might normally scroll out of view. With dynamic menus, your
navigation is always in sight.
You can make your menus visible on the page at all times, or
trigger their appearance with either left or right mouse clicks, or even when
the mouse hovers over a graphic -- like a Windows Start button -- a very cool
effect.
The application can upgrade itself by checking the
availability of newer versions. And soon they will be offering a library of
menu styles to increase the diversity of the look and feel of the menus.
For more information and to download a free
trial of this DHTML wonder, click here.
Pop Up Menu Creator
