Re: Keynav implementation issues

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Padraig O'Briain wrote:

> Owen taylor wrote:
>  (I'm not sure if there was a final decision on what the desired
>  behavior was. In some experimentation, it seemed to me that
>  what might be nice would be if Ctrl-F1 put the window into
>  a "keyboard tooltips mode" where the tooltip was always displayed
>  for the currently focused widget and never for the mouse,
>  toplevel would deactivate the mode as well.)

Without trying it, I guess the browse mode might be a good idea... it
still allows for the behaviour we originally had in the proposal, but
with the added advantage of being able to browse several tooltips at
once (e.g. on a toolbar) without having to press the 'show key' then the
'hide key' for each one.

If we went ahead with that, one option might be to make the accelerator
for "hide tooltips" a second press on Ctrl+F1, rather than Esc. That
could then allow us to provide a standard CheckMenuItem (with the
accelerator Ctrl+F1) on the Help menu to toggle the display of tooltips
for focused controls (much like the menu item for turning balloon help
on/off in MacOS).

That would make the functionality more visible to the user-- at the
moment, there's no way you'd know you could summon a tooltip by pressing
Ctrl+F1, and no way of knowing how to get rid of it again.  We could
then add that menu item as a standard in the UI styleguide.

I guess it all depends on whether "browse tooltips" is something you'd
want to work desktop-wide (as Mac balloon help does) or on a
per-application basis-- anyone have any views on this?  (Personally I
always get annoyed when balloon help isn't confined to the application I
was using when I switched it on, but then again I'm using it for a
rather different reason.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems