Extended tooltips

[carlopav]

Hello, as a newby of FC, I was thinking that would be really useful to have some information on what to expect from a toolbar command provided by a kind of extended tooltip. Could function like some other software I tried:
- holding the mouse over a button display just the name of the command
- waiting some more time, the description extends itself providing some additional informations on the tool for fist time users to guide the workflow. I saw that many of those are already present in the wiki.
- also a tooltip for the workbench selector could be wonderful: i got stuck an hour on the drawing workbench before realising I had to switch to techdraw.
- the extended description could also provide a link to a tutorial for the specific tool (?);

I think that won't affect much the pros, because they would never see the extended tooltips. But help a lot new users...
What do you think?

[triplus]

Hi @carlopav

We had some discussions already in the past, regarding having such possibilities in FreeCAD. Long story short, for now what you can do is to first install FreeCAD offline documentation, if not already installed, after use What's This command (Shift + F1). Once the command gets activated you can hover with the mouse over for example commands on the toolbar. Mouse cursor will change and you can left click to open help related to a command you hovered/selected.

[yorik]

The idea is interesting anyway (let me guess.. Revit? )

Right from the start,QT doesn't provide such a mechanism, but it would not be too hard to set up I believe. Just one more field to add to commands, and then a little combination fo timer + qevent to detect if the tooltip is still displayed and if yes change its contents.

The problem is much more the documentation itself. All commands should gain additional documentation contents. This is not a small work...

[saso]

It is also the #1 reason why most of today programs are several gb in size. I understand how it can be helpful for new users but personally I don't really like it. If the user has the wish to learn the program s/he will do it in one way or the other, on the other side if there is no real wish to learn it then this will also not help. This user "friendly" design discussions always remind me on "Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate", all this "helpful" things are not what in the end make good (pro) users.

[carlopav]

After some weeks testing I maybe agree with you that it was probably not so necessary... but belive me, the learning curve is steep!

Anyway @triplus, what about giving a hint on how to install the documentation package on the message box?

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@Yorik, yes, Revit, a software that has been quite difficult to learn at the beginning indeed, expecially to make it work as i wanted and not as it wanted...

@saso, the "Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate" looks quite extreme, i think many user's girlfriends/boyfriends would end up writing the letters with a white marker over that "incredible craftsmanship"

[triplus]

Anyway @triplus, what about giving a hint on how to install the documentation package on the message box?

Could be, but this is usually dependent on the platform you use and based on where from you get the package. Hinting, on what is missing, i guess already provides some clues, for end user to investigate further.

[yorik]

belive me, the learning curve is steep!

You are definitely right there, we all know it... It's surprisingly hard to fight that problem. We really need more ideas and thoughts on the UX side of things and small actions we can take to make to lower the learning curve (or big ones, but usually big ones bring other handfuls of problems...)

expecially to make it work as i wanted and not as it wanted...

Actually, all 3D apps are hard to learn (besides sketchup or tinkercad, but you cannot do so much with them). And if you know one well, it apparently makes learning the others even harder...