I love the look of the action button bar in the Notes 6 mail template. I've tried to mimic that in a couple of applications (with my own colors, of course). But every time I want to mimic it, I have to open up the mail template and figure out what Lotus did. So I just decided to post what Lotus did so I could find it easily.

The action bar properties is where all the magic happens. The individual action buttons don't have anything special (except that they don't show an icon). The "info" tab of the action bar properties doesn't have anything special - the buttons start at the left. On the "bar height" tab, the bar height is 4.75 Exs, and the font is 9 pt plain Default MultiLingual.

On the "color" tab, there is no image and the options say to repeat in tile format (which does nothing since there is no image). The color is key (actually, its the combination of this color and the button background color). This is the color of the entire action bar. This color should be a bit darker than the background color of the individual action buttons. Lotus defines a medium blue color in the mail template - RGB 113, 178, 207.

On the "border" tab, there is no border and no drop shadow. Under the "thickness" area, the top, left, and right widths are all 0, but the bottom is 1. The "old style bottom border" says one pixel fit to window with a darker color - RGB 63, 128, 128.

On the "button" tab, the height and width of the button size are default, but the margin is a fixed size of 5 pixels. The border is set up to be Notes Style with the text aligned to the left and no (0 pixels) internal margins. The button background color is a little lighter than the action button background color. The mail template uses RGB 192, 255, 255 (light blue).

Finally, on the "font" tab, the font is the same as the "bar height" tab - 9 pt plain Default MultiLingual, and the color is black.

So that's how to define the action bar so the buttons look like they do in the Notes 6 mail template.