FileMaker Tooltips As Data Delivery Vehicle?
I’ve always liked tooltips, the ingenious little popups that fade in and out of existence when users place their mouse cursor over certain hotspots on the screen. Generally, they give you more information about a link or describe the purpose of an obscure icon. And recently, in reading an interview with Shaun Inman (of Mint-fame) in the free Treehouse PDF, I noted that the beta-testers for his product Mint noted that data should not be presented to the users in the form of tooltips. I can understand this point of view but then again, tooltips can be an invaluable resource in the GUI toolbox for saving space, so long as they are not used exclusively for delivering the information they highlight.
I’m developing the next version of my bread-and-butter FileMaker solution (tooltip image above) and I’ve implemented a tooltip feature that provides deeper insight into real-time statistics. I like it and it works well. I think my users will like it as much as I have so far and response has been positive thus far.
Along comes Apple with their new digital photo workflow app Aperture (which rocks btw, but more on that in a subsequent post) and there in Apple’s own nifty new app is the feature that customizable tooltips instantly display EXIF and meta data for the image currently being viewed - see http://www.apple.com/aperture/quicktours/ for more info.
Thus my question comes back to how to use tooltips well? One could simply put icons and have the tooltips offer the descriptive purpose of the button, but given that a lot of processing ability is available to FileMaker developers for tooltips, using the calculation engine, it’s possible we are missing a golden opportunity by not exploring the larger options possible with customizable tooltips. How’s that for run-on sentences! I’m also wondering if these tooltips translate when a database is web-published i.e. if FileMaker will automatically translate them into HTML TITLE attributes, ALT attributes, or some JavaScript blend of code?
What are some of your thoughts on the new tooltips feature available to FileMaker users?
Yes, but why no tooltips in FileMaker (vanilla). I’m not a developer, and am only now upgrading to FM 8. The new “Define Database” layout (with Fields, Tables and Files definitions all on one page) shows a bunch of tiny icons on the bottom, but I have no idea what they do! No tooltips! I can’t figure out how to turn them on, IF they can be turned on.
That’s why I was searching the web for FileMaker tooltips and came upon your blog. If there is an answer, let me know!
John,
I don’t think there are any tooltips for those buttons. But most of them mimic the functionality of some of the toolbars in FileMaker, such as the Arrange buttons. I agree that it seems a bit odd that given some of the new functionality that they don’t clearly hint more as towards the button methods of interacting. Look in your FM documentation and you’ll see some good descriptions of what those buttons do.
With the use of the GetNthRecord function one can use the same tooltip for more than one button/icon, etc. An example could be a layout that has several addresses, phone numbers, etc.
Such that the mouse would reveal:
“This Is The
Primary Address”
or
“Click Here
To Promote To
Primary Address”