Bug 18437 - Tooltips in ccsm are uninformative and obvious
Summary: Tooltips in ccsm are uninformative and obvious
Status: RESOLVED NOTOURBUG
Alias: None
Product: xorg
Classification: Unclassified
Component: App/compiz (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other All
: medium normal
Assignee: David Reveman
QA Contact: Xorg Project Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2008-11-08 04:07 UTC by Jonas Kölker
Modified: 2009-02-07 15:29 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
i915 platform:
i915 features:


Attachments

Description Jonas Kölker 2008-11-08 04:07:33 UTC
Browse through the various configuration options in ccsm.  Find a tooltip for a label that says something you can't guess from the label text itself.  Note that this takes a while.

Here's a few examples of "Label: Tool tip" pairs.

[General Options]
Cursor Theme: Cursor theme name
Cursor Size: Size of the cursor
Ping Delay: Interval between ping messages
Texture Filter: Texture filtering

[the application switchers]
Speed: Switcher speed
Timestep: Switcher timestep.

Uhmm.. sure, thanks, *now* I know what the options do...

Here are some more informative [but probably incorrect] tool tips:

Cursor Theme: the name (not path) of the file in /usr/share/cursors that contains the cursor theme.
Cursor Size: the pixel height of the bounding square of the largest cursor.
Ping Delay: Compiz pings the X server every this many miliseconds.

I'm sure they could express the information more clearly; what I'm driving at is that more information should be conveyed.

Having fairly uninformative tool tips leaves the user unsure what their settings do except what can be gleaned from experimentation [I'm looking at you, Speed and Timestep].  Saying the same as the labels is not useful; what is useful is giving information (1) about valid values, and (2) that allows the user to predict how compiz will act given any particular value.

The uninformativity also conditions the user to not look at the tool tips, which leads to bug reports being filed against correctly working implementations of unintuitive features.  Such as Bug #18415, courtesy of yours truly ;)

(version: 1:0.7.8-0ubuntu4)
Comment 1 Kristian Lyngstøl 2009-02-07 15:29:54 UTC
This is unfortunately a long-standing problem. I'm closing this bug because we're moving bug trackers and this is an issue we're well aware of. We hope to improve this in Compiz 0.9. 

You are welcome to re-open this in bugs.opencompositing.org. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.


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