tooltip hides Gnome desktop's bottom panel

[André Pirard]

tooltip hides Gnome desktop's bottom panel (Ubuntu 8.04)

When the mouse cursor is moved over an "autohide" desktop bottom panel (normally containing the Windows List), the tooltip that appears hides the list in a most inconvenient way (there's no problem with non autohide panels because they can be read anytime the mouse is away).

When the cursor hovers over the top panel, the tooltip, although a bit too high, is well below the cursor and the panel text can be read.
But when it's over the bottom panel, the tooltip positioning logic seems to be the same, except that the tooltip is blocked against the bottom edge of the screen.
Hence, it hides what the object text is commenting.
Yet, when the tooltip is also blocked against the right edge of the screen so that the cursor can be moved inside it, the tooltip moves up in a way that make the list somewhat visible.

Hence,
1) the tooltip should stay a little bit further down away from the cursor when it's below it (top panel)
2) if blocked by an edge of the screen, the tooltip should stay away of the cursor in the other direction (hence making the bottom panel just as visible as the top one)
3) this applies to bottom and right edges

PS: Windows XP sometimes puts the tooltip under the panel ! :-)

[Mats (matsben)]

It can be surprisingly difficult to correctly position a tooltip
window in all situations. I don't have Ubunto but tested on KDE and
Gnome and there it looked OK. I did anyway a special handling for this
for the tray window tooltip that should handle various situations
better. On Windows I don't have any control of where the tooltip is
displayed since this is hardcoded into that widget.
Test the dailybuild found at: http://coccinella.im/breakfast/ tomorrow.

[Mats (matsben)]

I screwed up a calculation when I forgot to divide the scrren height
with two when finding out if taskbar at top or bottom. Now fixed. Next
try with tomorrows daily build. In any case it would be very valuable
with a screen shot if it still doesn't work.

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

Hi Mats,

Are we sure we're speaking of the same problem?
I reported one for Ubuntu Desktop.
Did you issue a fix to Ubuntu?
What daily built and where?
Is there a specific package I could download?

André.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, could you make a screenshot of the issue?

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

On 2008-04-29 22:10, Sebastien Bacher wrote :
> thank you for your bug report, could you make a screenshot of the issue?
>
Thanks too, but I wonder why you want shots of what every Ubuntu user
can see.
Screen shots do not show the pointer, so you can't relate it with
balloon position.
Furthermore, after a few shots, screen shot stopped showing balloons too.
In fact, we had one problem and now we have three :-)

Anyway, after one hour trying, I can send you this.
Screenshot-pointer_low : pointer at bottom of top panel, balloon out of
the way
Screenshot-pointer_high : pointer at top of top panel, panel partially
obscured

As could no longer show the balloon in the bottom panel, I pasted it here :

Screenshot-pointer_low : bottom panel totally obscured by pointer
anywhere in it.

Hoping I could help., thanks again.

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

Done.
Remember that it appears as a problem only with autohiding panels.
With autohiding, it's really pesting.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

that's known upstream, you can track it here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501720

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

Thanks for tracking this.
But alas, gnome-bugs consider this is a minor issue.
And it stayed that way and UNCONFIRMED for 8 months.

However, the bug is really a pest for autohide panels users.

Could it be possible to hasten gnome-bugs up a bit?
Maybe adding a message with a link to this bug?

But please remove the 3 unrelated messages in this thread to another one.

Thanks.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The screenshot was to make sure if you were speaking about the tooltips or about notifications bubble which can have similar issues, and no it's not possible to speed the upstream bug, the gnome-panel has lot of bugs and this one is only a small cosmetic detail so it's not an hurry and the upstream hackers are really busy and working on this mainly in their free time so they hack on what they want and are not to be told what to do or not

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

This bug is not at all "only a small cosmetic detail" to those who care.

If you look for something in an Autohide panel you obviously have to place the cursor in it.
Doing so at the bottom of the screen, you get a tooltip hiding the place where you have to look.
Not only does it it make using the panel very inconvenient, but it also looks stupid.
And with a application windows list in that place, that's stupid a lot because you often have to constantly move the mouse to unhide the windows you're looking for.

I personally also spend much -- and that's almost all -- of my free time for the sake of Ubuntu.
As a consequence, I hate it when the people I help find something stupid in it.
And I'm very surprised that those who would implement Accessibility features are prevented to be told that what they would like a magnifying glass to look at is in fact hidden behind a tooltip.

And I was kidding about Windows placing the tooltip behind the panel ...

Thanks to all who cooperate.