Every modern application uses little icons to display important information, and every other one I have ever seen provides “tooltips.” Which appear when you hover the mouse over the item. There’s no good reason, I think, why Blender does not now do the same. It ain’t hard to implement.
“Outliner icons” are critical to the Outliner, but they are a big stumbling-block for people who simply don’t remember what a particular icon means. Users should not have to go to some other place to find out – Blender should tell you, and do so in a familiar way. Namely, “tooltips.”
As an alternative, you could add something like an button on the right side, which would pop-up a window listing each icon and its meaning.
i’m not sure what you’re running into? i have tooltips for each of the visibility icons and the top buttons and all the options inside any dropdown menus.
Any icon that is gray has no tooltip. And these are clearly the important information. The only enabled tooltips represent actions. Many elements in the hierarchy have no tooltips at all: they are “all grey,” they only convey information, and they are right now unexplained.
There is an option in the preferences to disable tooltips. You might want to check there to see if you turned them off by accident. In 3.6 it is in the ‘Interface’ tab, ‘Display’ section.
I don’t have 4.5 or 5.0, but in 3.6 and 2.79 every single detail that isn’t a name or text label (since that would be kind of redundant) has a tooltip.
Yes not every thing has a tool-tip yet, instead of ranting here (we are not the Blender devs) you might want to take a trip over to Dev talk and suggest adding tool-tips for those icons in a friendly manner.
Try to avoid phrases like “Enough already”, "every modern application uses little icons to display important information, and every other one I have ever seen provides “tooltips.”
The UI module does do a lot of work constantly, there are improvements practically every day, Blender does have many tooltips, I see no reason why they would not consider adding more if needed as long as you do not upset them.
although I am not sure which “all grey ones” icons you are referring to
Most of them are coloured and the ones that don’t have tool-tips are things like lights, materials, modifiers, objects and object data blocks that have their name/description right next to them when you expand the lists. (Blender 5.1)
is your issue that there is no tooltip on objects specifically?
i did a quick audit of davinci resolve: tools show tooltips, items in the bin (closest thing to outliner) do not. photoshop: layers do show tooltips which are… the layer name which is already visible.
as others have mentioned, a proposal of the specific functionality you’re missing would be more productive than painting this as some sort of outrage. going around blender’s interface, most things seem to be tool-tipped quite extensively.
the one case where i see a problematic lack of tooltip in the outliner is the feature where clicking on object data types selects that object and forefronts the relevant data panel. it is fairly harmless for discoverability since it doesn’t change anything about your scene other than selection state.
however – clicking the camera data button is overloaded with a function to make it the active camera. an unintentional click will change which camera view renders, which represents a substantial change to the scene. its a convenient shortcut, but absolutely needs better visibility on what is happening.
I trust that the developers will not take my “plain language” personally. Nor should anyone. I am a developer myself, although I do not feel at all qualified to implement my own suggestion. (I am a developer, but not a “developer god.”)
I simply think that it should be added to the queue that someone implement “tooltips” for the informational icons within the Outliner. (And maybe, consider a distinct color-scheme for them that isn’t “gray,” which does imply: “disabled.”) To someone who is not instantly familiar with these icons, there is an “impedance gap.” The app is trying to tell me something, but I don’t understand what it is.
Regarding the “unexpected camera change,” some applications use informational dialogs – “such-and-such just happened” – which automatically fade-away after two seconds, or immediately when clicked. With a “preferences” option to turn this behavior on and off for those who would find it annoying. That might be a useful thing to do in some places . . . or maybe it could even be a “plug-in,” I don’t know.
Well, if you want something done, you need to at the very least make a proper proposal with clear explanation of your issue and maybe even mockups showing how to solve it.
I’m still not sure which icons you’re even talking about
Regarding the language: the tone of the title would make one think that you’re talking about some long-standing issue so horrible, that it’s a miracle Blender even works Maybe reconsider the wording
What is the problem here? I think the Outliner is quite self explanatory, all the icons seem to be clear and the tooltips seem to be OK…
I honestly don’t get what you are talking about. What is it that you are talking about? Which icons? Can you show in a screenshot or something? - maybe I just don’t understand what you are saying…
I’ve read this entire thread twice between last night and this morning, and I still have no idea which icon you’re referring to. It looks to me like everything that needs a tool tip has one.
A screenshot with some arrows pointing to what you’re talking about would go a long way.
They don’t have tooltips, but if you expand, it’s very clear what they are:
I think sometimes people are just bored and so it’s tempting to make up some imaginary problems… This is not coming from a new user either… I have never seen a new Blender user struggling with understanding those icons to be honest. I believe this is a made up issue.
I’m working on the outliner atm so I’m keen to know more but I don’t understand his point after reading his messages twice. Screenshots please. (Also RCS is ideal for this)
button on the right side, which would pop-up a window listing each icon and its meaning.
Maybe reconsider the wording 
