Tool Tips behaving badly

[Rod Gobby]

Chris

Except for a few DOS programs that still need to run under Windows XP, I now have everything else running on Ubuntu 10.04.

I've been able to switch to native Linux apps for most of my needs, but still use the following programs running under Wine 1.3.3: Power Basic, EZGUI, Help & Manual, and my own packages.

I make minimal use of the EZGUI designer, and only use Power Basic to compile programs and do some occasional debugging. However, I'm using Help & Manual all the time to generate documentation.

Everything is running smoothly, and I'm madly using my Data Dictionary package to create Windows apps, but I've noticed some odd tool-tip behaviour.

When running PB and EZGUI under Wine the tool-tips don't show on the toolbars, but they do show ok on the Help & Manual toolbars.

I don't use toolbars in my own apps, but tool-tips work fine on all my buttons. That's probably why I hadn't noticed the problems with PB and EZGUI.

I'll do some testing over the next few days to get a better feel for what's going on.

Rod

[Chris Boss]

Do the tooltips on the toolbars in the EZGUI Visual Designer work ?


Also try the follow sample code in the codeclips folder:

tooltips.bas

It displays tooltips on a toolbar, button, listview, treeview , tab control and trackbar.

[Rod Gobby]

Hi Chris

I compiled tooltips.bas on Ubuntu using PBWin9. I then executed tooltips.exe using Wine, with the following results:

Tooltips only show on Button1, and the vertical and horizontal sliders.

I then copied tooltips.exe to the Windows partition, then re-booted into Windows. I used exactly the same exe file that was compiled on Ubuntu in case there was a problem with compiling on Ubuntu.

This time the tooltips showed on all the controls.

It's interesting that the PBWin9 IDE shows the same problem, and it doesn't use EZGUI. Either there's a problem with Wine, or there's something about the way PB and EZGUI are handling tooltips.

Even more interesting is that Help & Manual doesn't show this behavior, and it's a beast of a program.

I'll dig up some more Windows based programs and try them under Wine to see how they behave.

Rod

[Chris Boss]

There are different tooltips in EZGUI!

There are tooltips which are controlled by the control itself (ie. Toolbar, Listview, Treeview, Trackbar and tab control) and which are created by using the ! property and there is a form tooltip (EZGUI creates a tooltip control itself and then adds controls to the tooltips list of subclass (tracked) controls).

The button control id displaying a form tool.

Whether a control displays a tooltip in wine depends upon whether wine supports specific window styles for that specific control type.

[Rod Gobby]

I've just installed a few Windows-based packages on Ubuntu and it seems that in general, the bigger and fancier the software, the more likely it is that tooltips show on all the controls. And I'm wondering if this has something to do with the programming language that was used.

In my tests the big packages like XMLWriter, Help & Manual, Inno Setup, and a few others, all showed tooltips. Whereas the smaller packages and utilities tended not to show tooltips.

I know that many languages do lots of fancy footwork behind the scenes to ensure that programmers don't have to contend with Windows' foibles. I think Delphi does that, and VB6 certainly did.  Perhaps the bigger packages are being written in those higher level languages.

I think what we're seeing here is that PB and EZGUI are interfacing with the Windows API in a fairly straightforward way, without all the fancy footwork. And perhaps the only way to get around the problem is for EZGUI to start doing some fancy footwork behind the scenes, and not rely on Windows' default actions.

Perhaps Wine just doesn't work well with vanilla Windows tooltips. But of course, this is only a problem if you want to run Windows programs on Linux.

I'll check around on the Wine forums to see what I can find out about tooltips.

[Rod Gobby]

Chris

I've checked a few forums and it seems there are various problems that Wine has with toolbars and with tooltips. However, the bugs seem to vary from one program to another.

It still begs the question of why some Windows-based programs show no problems at all.

Could it be that these programs are heavily into custom drawing of controls? They certainly have a more sexy look about them than the average Windows program.

Rod