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From: ashwin@gatech.edu (Ashwin Ram)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: System 7.0: Interesting Times
Message-ID: <1440@mephisto.edu>
Date: 24 May 91 13:45:36 GMT
References: <19650@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <1991May21.035848.3364@palace.uucp>
Sender: news@gatech.edu
Reply-To: ashwin@cc.gatech.edu (Ashwin Ram)
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing
Lines: 30
In-reply-to: dmt@palace.uucp's message of 21 May 91 03:58:48 GMT

In article <1991May21.035848.3364@palace.uucp> dmt@palace.uucp (Darryl Trujillo) writes:
>   leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue) writes:
>   
>   >A few other things that I don't like so much:  I think most people will
>   >want to lose the balloon help after about 0.02 nanoseconds.  It's pretty
>   >obnoxious.  Fortunately, you can turn it off easily.  Unfortunately, the
>   >balloon control continues to take up room in your menu bar.  I hope 
>   >someone writes an INIT or patch that gets rid of it.
>   
>   Baloon help might get more interesting as more apps begin to support it...

Yes.  But I would rather have Help be under my control, rather than be always
on or always off.  For example, instead of having all possible Balloons
popping up as I move my mouse, why not allow me to point to what I want help
on and hit the HELP key on my keyboard?  It is pretty tedious to go to the
menu bar, turn on balloons, go back to the item I want help on, read the
balloon, go back to the menu bar, turn off the balloons...  Furthermore,
since help-on-demand (via the HELP key) is not obstrusive, it can always be
left on.  (It is also pretty counter-intuitive to have a help key on your
keyboard that doesn't do anything.)  Finally, the balloon help icon on the
menu bar could easily be replaced by a "Help" item in the Apple Menu.

In short, I like the balloons but I don't like the user interface.

Another nice feature would be to have a "documentation" button in the
balloons which you could click to get to the appropriate section of the
manual for full documentation.  (Many applications have on-line
documentation already, and this would be a nice way to get to it.)

-- Ashwin.