Summary

Toolbar Integration Manager, or TIM, is a collection of toolbars for developers and designers. The toolbars overlay the user’s screen, adding a wide variety of utilities to whatever programs they are using. Additionally, the user can collapse, expand, and change the orientation of each toolbar, so that they can lay out their screen space in whatever way is most convenient.

This application was built over the span of about 8 weeks, with myself as the sole developer. It is built in .NET’s Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF. Coding was done in C# and XAML using Visual Studio 2012, and each graphic in the application was created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

The Concept

The overall goal of this application was to solve a problem that both I and my peers face very frequently. While programming, I often find myself in situations where I have a small problem I need to solve, or a concept I’m having trouble visualizing. The solutions to situations like these are theoretically very simple and very quick, but because I don’t have any relevant utilities on hand I end up opening largely irrelevant programs, just to use some small feature of theirs. An example of this is trying to create a color pallet for the visual aspects of a program and having to open up Adobe Photoshop, just to use its color edit tool. Often I receive suggestions to download an application, plugin, or extension that specializes in solving that problem, but doing this consistently would only lead me to downloading a large number of applications, each only helping with a single specific issue, and each only ever being used once or twice. To make it worse, a lot of these applications come with a very hefty price tag for the very limited functionality they would give me access to.

My solution to this dilemma was to create a set of tools that will help with a wide variety of specific issues, as well as provide tools that are much more generalized and could be used on a much more daily basis. As someone who has a passion for visual design as well as coding, I made the decision to not gear these tools solely towards programmers, but to provide things that a designer could make use of as well.

Download

Unfortunately, TIM is temporarily unavailable for download.

Toolbar Overviews