Subject: RE: Freakin' annoying tooltips - msg#00048

This is probably bad form, but I'm going to address this last slew of emails in
one big chunk. And
these are, of course, just my opinions.

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:04:11 -0500, Gregory F. March wrote
> In principle, I agree that point. However, this request is for the
> purpose of allowing the user to work around an issue in a dependent
> piece of software (GTK+ in this case). It does not fall in the
> category of "add preferences because I can...".
>
> Personally, I don't care how it's done - if a plugin could do it,
> fine with me. But these tooltips have to go! (I'm biased on that last
> point :-) )
>
> /greg

That doesn't change the fact that it is still an addition of a preference that,
in theory, should not be
desired by the majority of users. Whatever that gtk bug is should be fixed.
Adding a work-around
in Gaim removes some amount of incentive for them to fix it.


On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:32:12 -0800, Ka-Hing Cheung wrote
> I think even if many people like such a "feature", since it's
> toolkit level stuff they should bug gtk+ people to let you disable
> it in gtkrc (if it's not possible already)
>
> -khc

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:06:25 -0500, Gregory F. March wrote
> No... tooltips are an application specific thing. You may want
> tooltips for some application (like ones that are new to you), while
> for more advanced users, they may not be applicable.
>
> To turn them off on the toolkit level is just wrong...
>
> /greg

I'm with greg on this one. If tooltips are going to be disabled somewhere I
think it would be best if it
were in the application, for his reason and because gtk isn't really easy to
configure.


On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:09:05 -0500 (EST), Todd Vierling wrote
> I'll give you another reason. I use gaim and many other apps via a remote
> protocol (RDP; sometimes VNC as well) so that I can have a relocateable
> desktop that is usable over 802.11b, and even from across the city
> (my home machine's display at my employer is common). In such a
> context, tooltips are VERY BAD because they cause lots of spurious
> screen updates that increase bandwidth demand. In a remote display,
> turning off all nonessential screen updates is essential.
>
> This is probably why my preference is, indeed, to disable all
> tooltips. So you can take the above as a technical request to
> provide such an option to disable tooltips altogether.

And how many Gaim users actually do that? (This is rhetorical, I'm sure the
percentage of people on
this mailing list that do this is higher than the overall percentage.) I don't
feel like disabling tooltips
is the correct solution to this problem, either. IMO better solutions are to
get more bandwidth/lower
latency, don't use a graphical IM client, or don't use IM remotely at all.

And yeah, those solutions aren't ideal, but I don't think catering to the small
percentage of people
that want to disable tooltips is a good solution, either.

And again, these are just my thoughts, printed on 100% recycled something or
anothers.
-Mark

PS. NNNNNNNN CCCCCCCCCCCCC STAAAAAAATTTEEE

--
O O Mark Doliner
\ | mark@xxxxxxxxxxx
\ | www.kingant.net
"There needs to be a better word for weird."


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