Using "Hover" to make new buttons appear

[Jason Mark]

We have a FM 12 solution which includes a contact list, and I want to create easy links to the contacts web pages and to email the contact from the list view, but from a UI point of view I don't want the buttons on the screen all the time.

 

So I'd like to have the "email" and "web link" buttons ONLY appear when you hover over a specific contact and only for THAT contact.

 

Using "hover" I can make the buttons disappear, and reappear when hovered over, but I want BOTH buttons to appear whenever you're hovering over the ENTIRE contact.  I've though about making a background image that comes up and putting the actual buttons on *top* of that, but that seems sloppy and logistically is hard since I then can't nudge the buttons a few pixels without cracking photoshop.

 

Any ideas?

[Fitch]

Before FileMaker 10, we used plugins for script triggers. Some of those plugins are still around. You could put a calculation into a tooltip so that hovering would trigger a script, which gives you all kinds of options.

 

Another idea (not tested): what if you start with buttons masked, and the hover state is transparent?

[Lee Smith]

 

Another idea (not tested): what if you start with buttons masked, and the hover state is transparent?

 

That was my thought, but my question was going to be if they were trying conserve real estate? And then how would the user know that there was any buttons there at all?