This week, I nabbed a low-hanging (but juicy!) fruit. I implemented tooltips for all of the static UI elements…
Tooltips are just one of those little things that you tend to take for granted. The ability to hover a mouse cursor over a UI element and get a clue as to it’s functionality does is one of the prime ways that users learn your program. They learn not only what that specific element does; by considering it’s placement context, the meaning of nearby elements may be inferred.
In wxWidgets, adding a mouse hover tooltip is as simple as calling the SetToolTip() method on the control. Certain control types allow you to just place the tooltip text inline in the constructor.
![Sample Tooltip code](https://i0.wp.com/justinmangue.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/VISTAS_TOOLTIP_SS.jpg?resize=402%2C82)
Source code for a sample tooltip…
And here is the result:
![Sample wx code for a Tooltip](https://i0.wp.com/justinmangue.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/03/VISTAS_TOOLTIP_SS2.jpg?resize=120%2C75)
The tooltip in action!
Unfortunately, dynamic tooltips are going to require a lot more work. Eventually I’d like to add dynamic tooltips to the items in the Data & Visualization panes, which would provide various kinds of information depending on what kind of element the mouse is hovering over, but this is going to have to come later.