Comment Feed for tooltip behaviour on Windows Vista (TechOff on Channel 9)

Re: tooltip behaviour on Windows Vista

Joe Chung — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:47:21 GMT

There is a setting to adjust the timeout of Windows notification dialogs in Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I don't think tooltips use that setting. Perhaps this should be an accessibility feature request to add a timeout setting for tooltips in a future release of Windows?

Re: Re: tooltip behaviour on Windows Vista

Brolin Empey — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:06:27 GMT

I have some experience developing Windows applications, but now I am mostly an end user and/or sysadmin. I am a technical user, though, not someone with no development experience. I am not a professional developer, but I have taught myself a lot about computer programming and user interfaces, for example.

Re: tooltip behaviour on Windows Vista

W3bbo — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:04:38 GMT

I'm no expert on the subject, but I imagine the timeout exists because users habitually rest their cursors somewhere and since a lot of places have tooltips you wouldn't want it on-screen all the time.

In the past tooltips were no more than a few words, for helpful descriptions you used help popup windows (aka the "What's this" button) which had no timeout but seem to have been phased out in the new Vista HIG documents.

As for #2: It depends on what API you're using to display tooltips (I assume you're a developer?) As for Firefox, besides that "No Tooltip Timeout" extension I can't see anything in about:config, so I guess that's the only way.