The tooltip state. Not that good. Proposal for improvement.

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Saturday, May 26, 2012 03:08:41 Mark wrote:
>> For dolphin i can understand the reason to have it's own tooltip class
>> because it wants to fetch the tooltip data in a separate process in order
>> to prevent a crash in the tooltip from crashing dolphin.
>
> there is no reason this could not be accomodated in the Plasma tooltips. the
> file icon would specify that it has a tooltip, when shown the manager sends it
> the about to show signal, it starts the process of fetching data, when that
> arrives it actually populates the tooltip content.
>
>> To get this in a workable situation where anyone can use the tooltips as
>> they seem right we probably have to make a new ToolTipManager altogether.
>
> there are 3 classes in Plasma's tooltip system:
>
> ToolTipManager -> this one keeps track of which items have tooltips, owns the
> tooltip UI, shows/hides the actual tooltip and tells widgets when they should
> be updating their content because the tooltip will be shown (and again when to
> stop because it will be hidden)
>
> ToolTipContent -> this one stores what is in the tooltip itself and is used by
> the widget to tell the manager what should be shown
>
> ToolTip -> this is a private class, and handles the UI display
>
> styling belongs to ToolTip. definition belongs to ToolTipContent. management to
> ToolTipManager.
>
> so if it is an issue of styling and controlling that style, then ToolTip would
> need adjustment and perhaps ToolTipContent to direct which style to use.
> ToolTipManager probably wouldn't get touched.
>
> however, do we really need radically different visual styles?
>
> all three application have a pixmap on the left and text on the right. the
> text on the right changes a fair amount from app to app, though: in
> systemsettings it is a category, a separator and a listing; in dolpin, it's a
> title, a separator, and a nicely aligned table of metadata. in Plasma we see
> very similar arrangements in the clock with multiple timezones and in the
> pager displaying multiple windows.

For System Settings, the listing has icons as well. Is this possible
with Plasma's tooltip classes?

At the moment, it uses QWidgets (QIcon and QLabel to be precise) with
layouts, as the previous QPainter based code did not handle RTL
layouting properly, and quite often had rendering errors (text running
outside the painted background, etc)

>
> so i'm not sure it's a styling issue at all, and would in fact suggest that
> having a consistent presentation would be an improvement over the current
> situation.

Agreed, plus it would reduce the amount of code used :)

>
> there are things that could use some improving, however:
>
> * Plasma::ToolTipManager is fairly focused on QGraphicsWidget. making it
> usable with QWidgets and ready for QML2 is probably important.
>
> * it assumes one tooltip per widget; this was an issue for folderview, which
> it worked around by putting an invisible item over the item the mouse was
> over. perhaps this could have been different in folderview, however, and isn't
> a real problem in practice.
>
> * ToolTipManager uses QMetaObject::invokeMethod to call toolTipAboutToShow and
> toolTipAboutToHide in items that have tooltips. it would be nice to have a
> more elegant way to do this, in particular a mechanism that would work nicely
> with QML2 and which allows the widget with the tooltip to define the
> connection.

For System Settings, the items are in a QGridView, so not sure where
the toolTipAboutToShow, etc methods would go here (on the items
themselves, or the view?)

>
> so there are certainly some design issues to be addressed.
>
> as for content, it would be interesting to see if ToolTipContent could be
> extended in some way to more easily accomodate the needs of things like
> showing a table of data (perhaps a QHash<QString, QString> .. what does
> dolphin use for this datastructure?)
>
>> The current one is _way_ to much tailored at tooltips for the tasks
>> plasmoid and doesn't leave much room for customization (correct me if i'm
>> wrong).
>
> the tooltips in Plasma are used by pretty much everything in Plasma. the only
> thing specific to the tasks plasmoid in them is the ability to view previews of
> windows.
>
> most things that use the tooltips ignore this feature cmpletely as it is not
> relevant to them. it is a requirement of some uses, such as in the tasks
> widget.
>
> so i wouldn't say that the current tooltips are too tailored to the tasks
> widget as they are used, well, everywhere.
>
>> I would like to suggest a ToolTipManager with styles! Not themes! I
>
> perhaps this can be determined by the content rather than by explicitly
> setting the style in the application, which is probably just asking for
> inconsistencies. i also don't like the idea of having to subclass things just
> to get a nice tooltip in an application. it's both too much effort and too much
> of an invitation for inconsistency.
>
> i realy wonder if the existing Plasma::ToolTipManager could not just be used
> in system settings already? if it is because it is too QGraphicsView centric,
> let's fix that first ...

Plasma::ToolTipManager probably could be used I imagine. Other than
the existing layouting code, etc. there is no QWidget based
connection. The only connection is that the ToolTipManager is passed
QAbstractItemView pointers, and expected to set itself up
appropriately to trigger.

>
> i do think this is a good project that can bring a very nice improvement in
> looks and consistency... thanks for taking it on! :)
>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>

Regards,
Ben Cooksley