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Tooltips blinking issue

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balala
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Tooltips blinking issue

Post by balala »

Hello everybody,

New question arised. A friend of mine, who is using Rainmeter as well, asked me something about Tooltips and I didn't even see his problem so far. He says he sees the Tooltips blinking. I don't see this, so that's why I suggested him it's something related to his screen, but he says he sees this on all screens. My question is if anybody else does see this blinking on tooltips?
Here is a short video showing what am I talking about:

https://youtu.be/CYbK_kQEuss

He also says the blinking rate is related to the Update rate of the skin. The skin shown in the following clip has the Update set to Update=1000:

https://youtu.be/0LXu_wEf2Xo

While the following one has the Update set to Update=40:

https://youtu.be/ZR7d43ozVDg

As you can see there is a difference between how the two Tooltips are blinking. However a such blinking is always visible.
So, doesn anyone see such blinking on his screen?

Thanks in advance for any reply.
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jsmorley
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Re: Tooltips blinking issue

Post by jsmorley »

Yes, this is a known issue with the tooltip functionality in Windows that we use. The entire tooltip is "destroyed" and "recreated" on each update of the skin, and if there is more than a few words of text in the tooltip, you will see a visible blinking. There is nothing we can do about this short of baking our own tooltip functionality. Doing that would be complicated and a lot of code.
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balala
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Re: Tooltips blinking issue

Post by balala »

jsmorley wrote: May 20th, 2021, 4:41 pm Yes, this is a known issue with the tooltip functionality in Windows that we use. The entire tooltip is "destroyed" and "recreated" on each update of the skin, and if there is more than a few words of text in the tooltip, you will see a visible blinking. There is nothing we can do about this short of baking our own tooltip functionality. Doing that would be complicated and a lot of code.
Thanks for the details. However I still have a question, namely that why I don't see this blinking on my screen? Because I don't see it on shorter tooltips, even if on a extremely long tooltips I do see it. But for this I have to have at least a few lines of text.
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jsmorley
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Re: Tooltips blinking issue

Post by jsmorley »

balala wrote: May 20th, 2021, 5:26 pm Thanks for the details. However I still have a question, namely that why I don't see this blinking on my screen? Because I don't see it on shorter tooltips, even if on a extremely long tooltips I do see it. But for this I have to have at least a few lines of text.
I guess it will vary some depending on whether or not you are displaying some "measured" value. It seems to blink more if so, as opposed to when it is just static text. In any case, I suppose it will vary some depending on how fast your computer and graphics capabilities are, but in general, it will always blink on each update, even if it is tiny enough to not be very noticeable.
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balala
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Re: Tooltips blinking issue

Post by balala »

jsmorley wrote: May 20th, 2021, 5:33 pm I guess it will vary some depending on whether or not you are displaying some "measured" value. It seems to blink more if so, as opposed to when it is just static text. In any case, I suppose it will vary some depending on how fast your computer and graphics capabilities are, but in general, it will always blink on each update, even if it is tiny enough to not be very noticeable.
Alright, thank you for explanation. Good to be known...
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Yincognito
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Re: Tooltips blinking issue

Post by Yincognito »

balala wrote: May 20th, 2021, 4:35 pmNew question arised. A friend of mine, who is using Rainmeter as well, asked me something about Tooltips and I didn't even see his problem so far. He says he sees the Tooltips blinking.
jsmorley wrote: May 20th, 2021, 5:33 pmI guess it will vary some depending on whether or not you are displaying some "measured" value. It seems to blink more if so, as opposed to when it is just static text. In any case, I suppose it will vary some depending on how fast your computer and graphics capabilities are, but in general, it will always blink on each update, even if it is tiny enough to not be very noticeable.
A bit late to the party, since I don't roam this forum section much (Bugs and Skins are my favorites, LOL), but yes, the OS tooltips are blinking, depending on the amount of data displayed and the update rate of the software they run for (in this case, the calling Rainmeter skin). It doesn't matter if you are displaying a "measured" value, it's just that the blinking is more visible to the naked eye if the content of the tooltip is also changing, that's all - a common optical illusion. As jsmorley pointed out, it's possible that it depends on how fast your computer is too, though I have no way of testing this myself.

I've done A LOT of testing regarding tooltips, and the blinking (very obvious in my animated skins, due to the low update rate) was the main reason why I developed my custom tooltips. They don't blink at all, you can use any skin design for them (i.e. limited only by Rainmeter's capabilities), they correctly position themselves just like the OS tooltips, they even support a "preferred" direction to display them towards, etc. They don't need the Rainmeter devs to waste time developing such a capability either, it's under the sole control of the user (just like the Rainmeter team wants it to be). Now that I became reasonably proficient in Lua, I guess I could even more simplify the approach as far as the user is concerned (not that it was overly complicated in the first place, the user only had to set their "index", icon, title and content, similar to the OS tooltips, the rest was already taken care of), if needed - I guess I could even use the meter's own tooltip options to set the values of icon, title and content, then, with TooltipHidden set to 1 to prevent the OS tooltips triggering in, grab those option values from Lua and pass them to the tooltip skin for display, along with the appropriate coordinates of the meter, in order to compute the tooltip skin's position as usual.

For the record, I'm using the approach for over a year now in my skins, with 0 issues so far, other than occasionally / rarely Rainmeter keeping the tooltip skin in a semi-loaded state (Brian knows what I'm talking about, though the behavior is almost impossible to replicate "on demand"), but even that minor thing can be solved with one or two mouse clicks (to unload and load the tooltip skin again) in Rainmeter's context menu.
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