Hello, Since the new tooltips API allows us to put custom widgets in a tooltip, I thought it would be nice to make that widget be a drawing area showing an alpha transparent Cairo drawing. So I wrote testcairotooltips.c for fun. You can see how it looks like [1] or even download it [2]. (I built it in gtk+/tests so the archive also contains a small patch for Makefile.am.)
The rectangle drawing code is from cairo snippets. My first idea was to put a balloon, but I don't know how to draw it quickly yet since I've just started learning Cairo for real. But perhaps the "container" drawing doesn't have to be drawn in code at all; instead it could be loaded from a .svg with librsvg and cached at program startup or idle time. Then some text could be rendered over that context with Pango. While this approach could be taken instead of the usual (mostly) boring tooltips, a program could have something like a help mode which would turn on extended tooltips showing more text and some small images to help the user. This is just an idea of course. I think that this is useful and gives more pleasant experience to the user, thus not just useless eye candy. If you think that it is a good idea to suggest the developers to consider making such tooltips then perhaps it would be good to make it even easier in the API. For instance, calling: gtk_widget_create_tooltip_cairo_context (GtkWidget *widget, cairo_t *cr) and a query-tooltip-draw signal (instead of query-tooltip for this purpose) would be enough, while internally a window with the alpha colormap would be set with drawing area for which this Cairo context is created. (I'm CC-ing gtk-app-devel-list since I guess there might be people interested to hear this.) Marko [1] http://marko.anastasov.name/cairotooltip.png [2] http://marko.anastasov.name/testcairotooltips.tar.gz _______________________________________________ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
