I am sure you already read very nice post by Jensen
Harris that describes Super Tooltips in Office 12. If you are like me,
then immediately after you read it you wanted to add them to your application.

Well fear no more 🙂 Luckily we’ve been working on Super Tooltip addition to DotNetBar
Suite that will be out any day now (beta). Here is first screenshot of Super Tooltip
from next release of DotNetBar:

As you can see all major elements are there, header, body text, footer with footer
image. Since gray gets boring we went further and added over 10 color schemes
so you can choose right color scheme that best reflects the type of information you
are providing to your user. This is one of the colors:

Choosing right color is simply single property setting, well you can pick it right
in the Super Tooltip designer:

Size of our Super Tooltips is automatically calculated based on content. For cases
where that is not good enough you can simply specify your own size right there in
designer.

You can also preview tooltips by moving the mouse to tooltip preview are like in the
screenshot above.

Body image is also available to Super Tooltips. Here is the screenshot of tooltip
utilizing that feature:

This is very simple and easy to use component that you drop on the form and all
your controls will have SuperTooltip property available. Adding Super Tooltips to
each control after that is simple matter of using the Super Tooltip designer.

I think this is one of the high value usability features that one can add
to application since in my experience most of users “browse” through the
product by checking tooltips and trying things rather than reading documentation.
And who can blame them, discovering and exploring application interactively is certainly
more fun than reading the manual.

As always your comments and feedback is welcomed…

Denis Basaric, DevComponents LLC.