[openbeos] Re: Tool tips (was Re: Quick questions on Filetypes and Tracker)

> But I could see having an option to enable or disable them, at
> least in tool bars or other normal interface elements.

I think as long as the enable/disable option is global (and thus
can't be omitted by application developers), that wouldn't be
too bad. But the user interface guidelines would have to make
it clear that tool-tips shouldn't be relied upon to convey
important information.
Perhaps the guidelines should encourage displaying important
mouse-over info via other methods, such as in the status bar,
rather than leaving it completely undefined?


> But I think that inside a browser window, for things like HTML
> title attributes, image captions and abbreviations they should
> always be on.

This could pose a problem if the tool-tip disable is system-wide
(unless there are multiple enable levels), but perhaps this is a
case where the information is too important to display in tool-tips
anyway?

In other words, use the status bar (which in Firefox spends 90%
of the time just saying "Done", and is very underutilised in many
applications) to show tab titles and image alt text, particularly
when the tool-tips are disabled?


> In regards to tool tips sometimes being annoying, I can understand
> that perspective. I personally find them quite useful, and am
> annoyed when applications don't have them (in particular in tool
> bars with icons that I cannot identify.)
[snip]
> or the Mail tool bar

Personally, I think the BeMail toolbar is actually close to an
ideal example of a BeOS/Haiku toolbar, and is a good example of why
tooltips are unnecessary for general help when an application is
well-designed.

You mentioned that you find them useful when an application's
toolbar icons aren't particularly obvious, but BeMail avoids this
problem in two ways: firstly, the icons are pretty simple and
clear, and only has the most frequently-used options on the toolbar
(thus needing fewer icons, so there's less confusion between them).
Secondly, there's a small text caption below each icon, which takes
up very little screen space, but makes it totally clear what each
icon does.

If all Haiku toolbars followed a similar example, I don't think
there would be much need for tool-tips in most applications.
And most importantly of all, it would discourage making unclear
toolbars with obscure text-less icons!

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