Tool tips ideas

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 04 April 2009, Emdek wrote:
> > what are the use cases?
>
> For example my friend is working on STasks plasmoid (that Windows 7 taskbar
> clone) and he completely changed the layout of task tool tip, added close
> icon, moved text to top and later he want to make title text scrollable
> when it is too long to show it in one line (personally I don't like
> scrolling idea...).

that's not a use case, that's just what your friend did. what are they trying 
to achieve? or is "be different" the whole goal? (i'm guessing it isn't)

dealing with text that is too long could be done in the regular tooltips, of 
course.

> In my applet there are launcher together with tasks and
> for consistency I'm displaying previews of files (for example if there is
> entry for image or video etc.) and it looks nice only when it is shown in
> the same way like windows live previews (this could be maybe solved by
> adding kind of method that adds file preview or set image as preview that
> looks like current window preview, with frame). 

this could be added to the API of ToolTipContent quite easily.

> I'm using also middle click
> on preview to close or left to raise it or iconify. 

so hiding tips needs to take hover of tip itself into account (easy to do :) 
and we need some clicked(ToolTipContent) signals

> Currently I'm using
> these tool tips also as kind of group menu when left clicking (there could
> be added support for raising - shown in grid - and iconifing groups of
> windows) and there is even kind of context menu (yes, I know, context menu
> in tool tip is something strange, but this is only experiment).

sure... it would be neat if you were experimenting with the real tip though :)

> Additionally my applet tries to add window previews also when there is no
> Compositing 

this is expensive and never works properly. it's just like the fake panel 
background: it's inefficient and ends up looking tacky. we have the tools to 
do it properly.

> or we don't use KWin 

this just needs to be pushed into the netwm spec and standardized for usage by 
others

> > what we don't want however are random things inserted into these tips
> > because
> > then:
> >
> > * we can not guarantee consistency
> > * we can not easily change how toolitps are displayed (due to external
> > assumptions about them)
> > * we can not provide non-visual tooltips mechanisms (think about the
> > possibility of showing tips on a remote system or display, for instance)
>
> Maybe there could be still possible to set current properties as fallback?

nothing you've said above requires the ability to put random widgets into the 
tooltips though, so i think we're good. we just need to work some patches out 
for the current tip.

interested in trying to get some patches put together? :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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