Tooltips
You have probably already seen several examples of using
basic tooltips with components such as JButton and JLabel. The following classes give you access
to much more of the tooltip system in case you need to develop something
beyond simple text tips.
The ToolTipManager Class
This class manages the tooltips for an application. Following
the singleton pattern, any given virtual machine will have, at most,
one ToolTipManager at any time—a
new instance is created when the class is loaded. (Of course, you’re
already familiar with Design Patterns by Gamma et
al., right?) You can retrieve the current manager using the ToolTipManager.sharedInstance( )
method.
Properties
The ToolTipManager
properties shown in Table
27-3 give you control over the delays (in milliseconds)
involved in showing tooltips and determines whether or not tooltips
are even active. The enabled
property determines whether or not tooltips are
active. The dismissDelay
property determines how long a tooltip remains on the
screen if you don’t do something to dismiss it manually (such as
move the mouse outside the component’s borders). The initialDelay property determines how long the mouse must rest
inside a component before the tooltip pops up, and reshowDelay determines how long you must wait after leaving a
component before the same tooltip shows up again when you reenter
the component. (These properties are used by a timer whose delays
are triggered by mouse events.) If the lightWeightPopupEnabled property ...