Re: Question Mark Cursor
Re: Question Mark Cursor
- Subject: Re: Question Mark Cursor
- From: Andrew Merenbach <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:57:27 -0700
On Oct 19, 2007, at 4:15 PM, Bill Cheeseman wrote:
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.
We should all bear in mind that the latest (wired) Apple keyboards
(the slimline ones with keys like those on the MacBook) have no Help
key, but rather a "fn" key, to expand the user's ability to utilize
the function keys (much as one does with the MacBook, but in a
different location on the keyboard).
Cheers,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden