Proposal for a new class: KToolTip

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Robert Knight said the following, On 2006-08-16 21:33:

> I second the idea.  If you have the chance, I would recommend looking
> at the tooltips used in Microsoft Office 2007.  The use of animations
> and images in them makes it much easier to understand the function of
> the various toolbar buttons and other actions.

1. You probably mean something like this: 
http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/tooltip.jpg

Take a look at the shot. The "Press F1 for more help" looks quite usable. I'd 
like to leave this to usability people (IIRC they have already crafted some 
like that, i.e. extendable context help aka "more info"). Anyone got a link to 
this?

OK, but the only problem is that the animated content requires artists and we 
probably have no enough of them. Let's see how complete our static graphics 
will be for KDE4.x... (x probably > 0).

Take a look at the shot again. Note that the graphics could be just a small 
screenshot showing the usage of the command, i.e a chart for 'insert chart' 
command, a table for 'insert table' command and so on. Nice thing, and -more 
important- easy to prepare graphics. OK, we can have that possible in the API. 
Benfits will be: consistency + good-looking layout of the elements.

If that's ok, I can add some TODOs to the wiki.

2. Being in tooltips department: taking our KToolTip class as a base, we can 
put a toolbar (created using XMLGUI of course) there and get a tooltip "panel" 
like this one:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/Word-2007-Beta2-Sample.png

The tool tip can evenually act also like a mini-dialogs with instant-commit 
behaviour, just like a toolbar/popup menu. But in this case this is not a 
tooltip, even while it appears just like a tooltip without user's intervention.
Oh, too much SCI-FI here, so I stop now. This feature may be too confusing and 
not necessary unless an app is using the Ribbon (traditional apps have 
bold/italic buttons visible all the time - for these apps _good_ context menus 
can be enough).

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
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