In office suites, browsers and email clients, I often end up customising the icon bars to suit me. In FH a custom icon bar to which we could attach (personally) commonly used options (e.g. a "run a specific plug-in", "open a specific custom diagram", "run a specific query", or just a specific sub-menu item, etc.) would be useful.
We have before discussed needing to run a plug-in after an activity (say entering a compound name in the NAME field and wanting functionality - such as the plug-in Mike wrote - to run to parse that name into the Name Part Fields - SURN etc.). In many respects, the ability to configure FN to run a plug-in after a program event (update NAME field for instance) would do this - but that is probably significant work. Being able to add an icon to a custom icon bar, means the user can just click that icon to get that functionality to run. It also means other activities as listed above could be associated with an icon. A customisable icon bar is probably therefore a better midpoint
I would suggest that for support purposes, the existing icon bar should not be customisable (so you would have view/hide/add/delete icon bar functionality).
Each icon would need to accept:
- A "FH instruction"
- which ideally would be context-sensitive - e.g. apply instruction to "current record", "current diagram" etc.
- tooltip text
- a custom icon image
David