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The old options UI infrastructure based on property sheet provided tooltips to give hints about meaning of various options. This is not present in new options dialog.
You are right. Old options dialog was confusing and thats why tooltips were needed. But attaching tooltips to each label in dialog is not a good practise, and it should not be needed in the new OD. If user do not understand some option, she should go to Help.
I do not agree. Where is the UI specification? I would like to see confirmation from our HIE before we close this as invalid. At least advanced options should have the capability to add tooltips. Even current set of options presented here contains some uncertain items and there is no contextual help.
1) Options Dialog has been reviewed many times by HIE - there is no such requirement. 2) Your request is very strange. Do you see some example of such UI (tooltips on labels, input lines) in NetBeans? I do not. Have you find smething like this in UI guidelines? 3) Advanced Options has support for tooltips, see Options Dialog API. 4) Contextual help is planned, but its different issue. If you are not sure about some UI patterns contact HIE first, please. Than you can fire bugs...
Radim, I'm not sure whether you complain about missing infrastructure for providing tooltips or you think that a specific option in the new options dialog should have a tooltip. If the latter, please list those options you think are hard to understand without additional information provided via tooltip (and reopen the issue ;-). Overall I think if it's not clear what an option does, there should be a tooltip that better explains the option's purpose. Clicking help is too complicated and slow.
Nice to hear your agreement. So here is my opinion General - package view has to be most important option but it is not quite clear for newbies IMO but I do not have strong opinion here - proxies should have tooltips to be consistent across the IDE advanced - some of Ant options may be more clear w/ it - form/mnemonics deserve tooltips IMO - everything in i18n category except the 1st checkbox is dark Other tabs are much more understandable.
Speaking about consistency, I think that its not a good solution to put tooltips on some options only. If some option is unclear we should improve its label. As far as I know using tooltips for labels inside of dialogs is not a common practise (at least on windows). You can try some applications, if you have time. Tiiltips has some usability problems. They are opened automatically, even if you do not want to see them. ANd they sometimes hide some important information. Thats why some special mode with tooltips has been used in some windows applications (there was special button with arrow and question mark). But as I know this pattern is not used any longer - it was not successful probably.
Created attachment 24693 [details] Screenshot after fix
In native Windows applications you have a question mark button in the title bar of dialog windows. This button is used for instant access to additional information about components in the dialog. AFAIK we don't have that in Java. Other OSes (that don't have that button as well) use tooltips for access to additional info. Thus we should use tooltips, but only if additional info is needed. Roman, what does the last attachment have to do with this issue? (Wrong issue?) Thanks.
Yes, wrong issue, sorry.
OK, Jano. You are UI engineer. But I really do not see tooltips for labels / text fields in windows application. But anyway. If you think that some component in new OD needs tooltip, be concrete please.
Fire concrete issues for concrete labels / panels in Options Dialog please. There are several modules contributing to OP.