Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.

This looks it's describing the same technique as the last example in https://emilkowal.ski/ui/you-dont-need-animations (and that whole post is worth a read, I think, if you found this interesting).

It's such a small detail that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed (because I don't build animations, so it doesn't cross my mind), but now that I know about it, I think about it all the time.

I think I would describe this as an example of hysteresis. Neat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis

I greatly appreciate this attention to detail, and there isn't enough of this in the world. For example, in Visual Studio popups on hover happen so fast you can barely select anything, or you end up clicking on the popup instead of selecting a word.

I ran into the same problem about 20 years ago when implementing hover-based dropdown menus on a website. It was only about 10 lines of JS and a couple global variables but I was the only person who understood it. :-P

(These days I would have included more comments.)

Naturally, there was a fallback to pure CSS menus, because we weren't barbarians.

Chris Coyier also posted a version using only HTML/CSS, no JS: https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-h...

Basically, have a global temperature. When the pointer is in something that has a tooltip, the temperature rises. Otherwise it cools (possibly at a different rate). A tooltip is shown only when the pointer is in bounds, and the temperature is above a certain threshold.

What about using mouse velocity? If the mouse is changing position at a certain rate, don't show the tooltips.

Windows taskbar has done this forever and I never once noticed it consciously. Good catch.

Feels like the delay also gets implemented into displaying the tooltip on tap on a touch interface which is probably an error.

I was disappointed to see the new web popover api doesn't have this basic usability feature built in

Is this post text claude-generated? Very creepy to read around the solution section. It reads like the agent report.

Hilarious. Web devs discovering UX from Win95. What's next, 3d buttons?

The pure CSS version seems more interesting to me: https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-h...

Perhaps I'm just an old grump, but I prefer the No Delay version in the example.

I like predictable, consistent, and fast.

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