System style picture ring / combo box

[mje]

I'm looking to create a UI element something like so:

 

 

That is I want to present a bunch of images in a pulldown menu for selection. The number of selections could potentially be large, so a scroll bar would have to appear depending on size etc. I don't particularly care for the built in picture rings because of their selection mechanism (bringing up a poorly sampled square thumbnail for preview) let alone a non-system styled control will really look out of place on my UIs.

 

It seems half of this application's UI implementation basically boils down to getting creative with picture controls-- and boy can you do a lot with them. Before I have relegate this feature's importance to "only if everything else is done", does anyone have any bright ideas that may make this reasonably trivial to implement?

 

Win32/.NET objects are OK for this application, but I don't think I have time to bust out any C#/WPF level programming for creating my own widget, otherwise I'd likely continue down the well beaten path of abusing picture controls and bending them to my will.

[hooovahh]

No I don't have any tool like that in my back pocket.  But I would love to see it implemented with a picture control.  I've done some stuff like that in the past and it was quite rewarding/time consuming.  I think that some .Net could come into play for image resizing (I'm in love with the GDI resize) so your drop down selection fits to the control size.

 

If I were to do this I would have a sub VI be the thing that is shown when you click.  It is called and moved into location to look like the drop down.  The VI would then contain a picture box on the left, a single column listbox for the text, and a vertical scrollbar.  Very do-able just time to get mouse clicking to index (with scrollbar) and mouse move on the controls to highlight the row by drawing some box around it.  Sounds like fun.

[mje]

Yep, that's pretty much what I was planning on doing should I get the time. I think it would be rewarding as well, but I've done a few things like this already in the app so I'm well aware of the time sink. I hope to get to it, but there are far more important things to tackle if it boils down to having to invent something like that.

 

And talk about a nugget on that GDI resize. I love it!