Button Workshop produces dynamic buttons. Each button can respond to a variety of mouse events by changing its appearance. This results in modern "active" buttons that give the user a visual feedback. You may be familiar with what is usually called rollover buttons. Such buttons typically respond to the Mouseover event (when the mouse pointer hovers over the button) by getting highlighted in one way or another. We can thus consider such a button to have two states:

Button Workshop supports 8 (yes, eight) states for every button. Firstly, a button can work as a "downable" toggle button that can remain depressed when clicked. Think, for example, of many power on/off buttons on various electrical and electronic equipment or old-style radio buttons. So, a button can be in a normal "up" state, or it can be in the "downed" state, and toggle between them when clicked. Not all buttons need this downed state, but some do.

Let's now examine what happens to a button in just the normal "up" state. We have already seen the two most common and obvious states: Normal and Mouseover.

When you press on a button, it goes into the Clicked state. By "press" we mean that you click the button with the mouse and keep the mouse... well... button - pressed. While the mouse is pressed, the button is considered to be in this Clicked state. Once you release the mouse over the button, the click has taken place, and the button reacts according to how it was programmed to react.

Finally, a button can be in the Disabled state, in which it does not react at all. Not very exciting but often appropriate.

We thus have 4 states: Normal, Mouseover, Clicked, and Disabled. Here's an example of what these states might look like:

But that's just for the "up" state. The very same 4 states can occur when the button is in the Downed state. So it makes sense to talk about the 4 additional states, which are the same basic 4, but in the toggled mode: Downed Normal, Downed Mouseover, Downed Clicked, and Downed Disabled.

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