Re: [Denemo-devel] Tooltips - what am I doing wrong?

[Richard Shann]

On Fri, 2015-11-20 at 14:31 +0100, Johan Vromans wrote:
> I do not feel like getting involved in Gnome3 debates. I'm running the
> Gnome2 based Mate desktop, and with reason.

Yes, I'm afraid my attempts at letting them know the impact they are
having have not been encouraging. And I, too, have just taken refuge in
the MATE desktop as I've just upgraded to Debian Jessie and the gnome
desktop "classic" has just become less "classic"...

> 
> Some remarks/observations, wrt. Gnome and wrt. Denemo.
> 
> If you create a toolkit that is intensively used by numerous tools, you
> bear a certain responsibility to the developers of these tools. You can't
> just do as you please. Satisfying even 95% is not enough.
> 
> If there are good reasons to deprecate tear-off menus and timed tooltips,
> then I expect a decent transition period (which Gnome3 has had, given that
> the deprecation started in 2012 or so) and guidelines for a good
> alternative. As I understand, there's currently no alternative to tear-off
> menus and timed tooltips. When software developers have spent numerous
> hours on a UI, it's not really helpful to state that the UI needs
> redesign.
> 
> In the good old days there was a "Help" key (later the F1 key was used for
> this) on the keyboard that requested a help text for whatever object the
> cursur was on. In Denemo, F1 just calls the (start of the) manual in the
> browser.
I wonder if we could get the various widgets to notice the f1 key and
respond with the tooltip - aha! I can do that with the menu items, since
pressing f1 is, at present, a request to set a shortcut, which is
handled in our own code.

> 
> In any case there need to be a (global but application overridable) setting
> to control the initial delay before a tooltip pops up. The fact that
> subsequent tooltips pop up immedeately is a bug. Period.
> 
> Denemo is overpopulated with tooltips. Everything (except for the main
> canvas) has tooltips.

No, the main canvas has one too. The bug is that more of them need to be
subject to the "newbie" flag - please raise a bug for that.


>  So there's almost no place where the tooltips (and
> the user) can come to rest.
> 
> I'd suggest to drop the "This is the menu bar" and "This is the
> tool bar" (and so on) tooltips. Also, the tooltips on the textual
> objects. A tooltip "Adding deleting navigating measures" is not really
> helpful on a menu item "Measures".

Well, it would be rather inconsistent to have some but not all of the
menus explained, and some do need explanations; it is only a real
problem because tooltip timing has been broken in Gtk>3.10. One of the
problems is that menu labels on toolbars force the window width out - I
don't know of a widget to handle this gracefully.

>  "Menu named Booktitles located at
> /ObjectMenu/Score/Titles/BookTitles" is definitely not helpful.

yes, that is auto-generated for menus that don't otherwise have
anything, but it would be better without. 

However, this is all a bit academic because it looks like we have to
drop tooltips altogether or become Gtk2 only. (If we support any version
of Gtk3 on GNU/Linux then the Distros will want to use the latest Gtk
version).

Richard