tool tips: further thoughts

[Richmond Mathewson]

Once the initial premise has been established:

"real tool tips in RR are a bit boring, therefore it
is much better to use fields to do the job"

the only limitations that are imposed on this type of
tool tip are the limitations imposed on text fields.

Of course if rectangular tool tips are just not fancy
enough for you you can use images or non-standard
shaped substacks to do the job (personally I would
avoid the latter as a substack can easily get "lost
behind" a main stack).

One of the wonderful things about Runtime Revolution
is the flexible nature of object categories; they go
beyond those awful Aristotelian categories with hard
boundaries, while retaining some sort of
prototypicality they do have fuzzy boundaries which,
for instance:

allows one to use an image as a button or a tool tip,

a field as a button or a tool tip,

a substack as almost anything.

This is why, with a little bit of thought and effort
it is quite possible to duplicate everything in RR
using a different method. It is also really quite easy
to develop one's own "stable" of objects that suit
one's individual needs.

6 years ago (!!!!) I used an image of the first frame
of an embedded quicktime movie as a button to start
that quicktime movie; this allowed the end-user to
believe that the movie was already loaded into the
page as a visible object before it began playing.

I suppose  people with time to spare could have an
awful lot of fun trying to use some particular object
in as non-standard was as possible!

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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