toolbox
[′tül‚bäks] (engineering)
A box to hold tools.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
toolbar
A row or column of on-screen buttons used to activate functions or change modes in an application. Many toolbars are customizable, letting users add and delete buttons as required. Toolbars may be fixed in position or float around the screen. For example, floating toolbars are common in graphics applications so they can be moved into the canvas area near the objects being worked on. See tool palette, taskbar, tool and toolkit. |
| Real Tools! |
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| Most toolbar buttons display only icons such as these from VTEL's videoconferencing software. Some toolbars include text descriptions. |
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| A Very Innovative Toolbar |
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| The 2016 line of MacBook Pro laptops introduced an extremely useful touchscreen toolbar in place of physical function keys. Each application can display its most important functions for the entire app or change functions based on the process that is running. See MacBook. (Image courtesy of Apple Inc.) |
toolkit
A single utility program, a set of software routines or a complete integrated set of software utilities that are used to develop and maintain applications and databases. There are toolkits for developing almost anything. See tool, developer's toolkit, library, class library and CASE. |
| A Whole Lot of Tools |
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| This logo is used for Red Gate Software's family of database utilities. The toolkit/toolbox metaphor is widely used by software vendors. (Image courtesy of Red Gate Software Ltd., www.red-gate.com) |
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| Sometimes You Need a Real Tool! |
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| Two-pound hammers are not part of a software toolkit; however, years ago, in order to debug the Windows version of this encyclopedia, the text had to be scrolled until it crashed. Rather than press the mouse button for several minutes, the weight of the hammer did the job. Were more sophisticated methods available? Sure. But this was the quick way. |
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