Re: Question Mark Cursor
Re: Question Mark Cursor
- Subject: Re: Question Mark Cursor
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:15:11 -0400
- Thread-topic: Question Mark Cursor
on 2007-10-19 5:59 PM, Uli Kusterer at email@hidden wrote:
>> A) What does this cursor mean? I see that in some applications it
>> does that
>> (turns into a ? and does seemingly nothing), and in others it
>> brings up
>> help.
>
> I vaguely remember that it's a special help mode that lets you
> click on objects to bring up additional help, but I haven't yet found
> an app that actually does anything in response to these "help clicks".
I devoted a short chapter of my (now somewhat obsolete) book to this: Cocoa
Recipes for Mac OS X: The Vermont Recipes, from Peachpit Press. There is a
Cocoa API to implement enhanced tooltips when clicking on any UI element
while the question-mark cursor is showing. It's an old NeXT thing, largely
supplanted by built-in (Interface Builder) tooltips in Mac OS X. But you can
easily do some things with the question-mark cursor that you can't do with
tooltips, like show fancy fonts in your tooltips.
Nobody does this now. But the Vermont Recipes application you build with my
book (written for Jaguar) still works in Tiger. Run Vermont Recipes, hit the
Help key to bring up the question-mark cursor, and click a Vermont Recipes
UI element. Up pops a tooltip with italics and boldface text in whatever
font the developer (me) chose.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
www.quecheesoftware.com
PreFab Software - www.prefabsoftware.com
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