Proposal for a new class: KToolTip

[Robert Knight]

> 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

Yes, a screenshot would usually be sufficient, perhaps with a simple
outline drawn around important features.

The downside is that it could add complexity to the translation process.

Regards,
Robert.

On 16/08/06, Jaroslaw Staniek <js at iidea.pl> wrote:
> 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
>   Kexi & KOffice: http://www.kexi-project.org, http://www.koffice.org
>   KDE3 & KDE4 Libraries for MS Windows: http://kdelibs.com, http://www.kde.org
>