Features and capabilities of the ToolTipsFactory components

All components have the following features in common:

• 100% managed code
• Works with .NET 1.0 and 1.1
• Full Visual Studio integration and support (Version 7.0 and 7.1)
• Full Visual Studio designer support (dynamic tooltip testing right inside VS)
• All layout elements are fully customizable (Border, Font, Background, Content) in code and through Visual Studio designer's.
• Layout elements (Border, Font, Background) can be rendered with solid colors, multicolored gradients, hatch-patterns and textures. Text can be rendered with shadow and the desired alignment can be selected.
• Full transparency support. (E.g.: make a multiline text with shadow float over your control, or show a semi-transparent framed photography of the person selected in a listbox).
• ToolTips can be configured to stay where they pop-up (classic tooltip behaviour) or to smoothly follow the mouse pointer. The latter possibilty allows a really dynamic use of ToolTips, like showing real-time mouse coordinates, implement a magnifying glass to look at images or show any information you like next to the cursor when moving the pointer over an image or diagram.
• Layouts can be saved and loaded either at design-time or at runtime. (XML-files)
• The ToolTipsFactory components provide their service as extended properties to all controls on a form. (I.e., each control on the form gets a new property, where you can assign the text or image to show in the tooltip for the specific control.)
• All layout properties of the component are overridable through this extended property. This allows making the same ToolTip look different for each control on the form. E.g.: The tooltip-text for the Delete-Button is red and for the Save-Button green. Layout properties are overridable at design-time or dynamically at runtime.

Additional features of the ToolTipsFactoryAnimation component:

• Smooth, flicker-free display of movies in ToolTips.

• A movie-clip can be assigned to each control on a form through the extended property provided by the component.
• A powerful Animation-Editor allows you to create and edit your own movies (see Image 1).
• All kind of images can be imported as animation-frames.
• Animated Gif-images can be imported and translated in to the ToolTipsFactory Animation-format.
• Imported images are automatically scaled down to the desired size.
• ToolTipsFactory-Animations do not have a static frame-rate. Individual display-time's can be specified for each animation frame. This allows to create really compact animations (e.g., instead of storing 30 times the same image to get one second of movie showing a static scene, you just define the frame to be shown for 1000 ms).
• Display-Time of each individual frame can be defined with an accuracy of 10 ms.
• A powerful timing-editor allows you to accelerate or slow down animations with a multitude of timing patterns (linear, exponential, logarithmical, free).
• Individual frames or groups of frames can be edited with a powerful image-editor (contrast, brightness, fuzzy color replacement) right inside Visual Studio.
• Import and export ToolTipFactory Animations as XML-files.
• Full transparency support.
• Automatically converts image-formats, depending whether transparency is needed or not. (I.e., if an a JPEG-image was imported for an animation frame (JPEG doesn't support transparency) and you define a color or a region in the image to be transparent, the image is internally translated into a format that supports transparency.)
• Animations can also be dynamically created or modified at runtime by the host application.

 

Additional features of the ToolTipsFactorySingleLine component:

• A symbol (any kind of image) can be displayed either on the left or the right side of the tooltip-text.
• A ToolTipsFactory-animation (see above) can be played either on the left or the right side of the tooltip-text.
• The animation can be edited as described in the additional features for ToolTipsFactoryAnimation.
• Smooth, flicker-free display of movies in ToolTips.

 

Additional features of the ToolTipsFactoryImage component:

• This ToolTip displays any kind of Image instead of text.