On 4 Jun 2008, at 01:52, Long Gao wrote: > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147642 is discussing how > to patch nautilus with tooltips. One of the patches provided an > experimental image preview, a little like what you mockuped. More > tests, suggestions and interests is welcomed.
Personally, I'd really prefer this wasn't done using tooltips. The clue's in the name-- files aren't "tools" :) One of my concerns is that in the file manager, you have a lot of 'hotspots' in a comparatively small area, and these tooltips will be fairly large to accommodate thumbnails etc. Thus there's a higher risk of accidental activation than on toolbars (e.g. people often subsconsciously point at items they're looking at on the screen, even though they don't wish to interact), and the consequences are greater-- once shown, a significant part of the window is obscured until the tooltip disappears again. Also, once a tooltip appears, moving the pointer to another hotspot causes that object's tooltip to appear immediately-- there is no delay on subsequent activations. So the user will have to try and find a 'dead spot' in amongst all those file icons to make the tooltip disappear again. (Or wait for the tooltip to time out and disappear, but I'm not sure that GNOME tooltips even do that.) Also, while tooltips are somewhat accessible via a keyboard shortcut that turns 'tooltip mode' on and off, this is a rather different use case that wasn't originally envisioned, and might require a rethink of tooltip accessibility. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
