Don’t be such a Tooltip!
Trend: Designed Tooltips
Fancy tooltips (like the one below from Adium) are a step above the rest. Just by adding visual elements and styling to the default tooltip, the messages are easier to read, more useful, and just nicer to look at!


Allan
Sep 2, 2009
1:47 pm
I think just the visual variation alone makes it easier to parse than the block-of-text type tooltip. Now if we can just get the tips to not obscure the underlying list itself…
Kate Vander Ploeg
Sep 2, 2009
3:08 pm
Actually, with Adium, the entire row is hoverable so that if your cursor is to the right of the text you get the tooltip without obstructing the underlying list. If you were to accidentally hover over the list and obstruct the underlying list, by moving your cursor you can move the tooltip over because the tooltip actually follows your cursor!
Google chat has a different way of handling the same issue of obstructing the content. Instead of the tooltip appearing right beneath the cursor, it appears outside the general container so as not to obstruct the content. It works just as well as Adium, but I find Adium more smooth and refined.
Juliet V.
Sep 3, 2009
12:44 am
Fun and playful! It is interesting to see how there can be such a huge difference between the two ways of displaying virtually the same thing…