In the general scheme of things, this is a relatively trivial issue, but it’s sometimes the little things that get under my skin. Winner of this year’s prize for most annoying new feature just has to be the new tooltips. They are really not good for my mental health. If I have tooltips turned on, I find it hard to use AutoCAD 2009 for more than a few minutes without wanting to smash my fist through the screen.
I would like to leave tooltips on just a little bit so they will let me get used to AutoCAD’s modified button appearance and location. All I want is a little one-word tooltip if I hover over a button, but I can’t have that. There is some control over tooltips to be had in the Options dialogue box:
Oh, sorry, you can’t see the options I’m trying to describe because there is a stupid great big tooltip in the way. What I’m trying to show is that if you turn off all but one of the toggles, you can at least avoid the embarrassing spectacle of AutoCAD covering up most of the screen with information about how to draw a line when you hover over the Line button. But you can’t persuade AutoCAD to just show you what the commands are, you have to have several lines of information, one of which is exactly the same for every single tooltip.
That’s not too bad I suppose, but try using a dialogue box. Nasty huge tooltips keep throwing themselves at you in a mad rush to obscure what you’re trying to see. You can move your cursor right out of the way to stop the tooltips from appearing, and then move it back again when you want to actually pick something, but what a waste of time, mental energy and wrist effort.
OK, so you’ve had enough of them? Want them all banished? Fine, back into Options, turn that last toggle off, pick OK (assuming it’s not obscured by a tooltip so you can see it) and you’re done. Or are you? Back into Options, pick the Files tab and do a bit of hovering.
Aaaagh! The stupid tooltip isn’t even accurate. It doesn’t describe what you’re hovering over, it describes the files category that’s selected, which could be off the screen. If nothing is selected, it describes the first category rather than what you’re hovering over. Duh.
OK, Autodesk people, own up. Who thought this was a good idea? Really, what on earth were you thinking?
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Related to this is the removal of the Description field at the bottom of some palettes and dialog boxes. The area is still there, but blank — making the dialog box larger than necessary.
I ranted about this on Autocad discussion groups. I was assured there that Autodesk don’t really give a rat’s ass what old users think….and the speculation was that maybe Autodesk was doing this kind of stuff on purpose to drive people to using model based products.
Well….I don’t really believe it, but if it is true, I won’t be driven to Inventor because if they will will “dis” old time Autocad users, they will most certainly do the same to Inventor users.
Meanwhile….I am going to go back to 2008 since 2009 is driving me nuts. The hope is that a service pack comes out that adresses this problem as well as others….like….”find” which zooms to the target, and upon closing the dialog box, zooms back out so that you don’t have any idea of where the “find” was within the drawing.
Short and sweet: Tooltips = real PITA
I totally agree. What is the point of a huge box that obscures everything. OK It’s useful to have something that gives a hint about the button, while you are learning. But eventually you KNOW what the bloody buttons sre and just need a small reminder for the ones you don’t use so often. I put a post in the C3d wish list for them to make tooltips a right click function. Then the info is there when you want it but not when you don’t