So not too long ago on #blendercoders, someone came in with a looong list of missing tooltips in Blender. He didn’t have a patch, and I think the other coders can probably be more productive than that, so I volunteered.
The problem is I don’t know that much about some areas. (Quite a few areas actually)
So what I’m going to do is this:
On Google Docs, I have uploaded the list of tooltips I don’t think I can write. It’s a bit annoying to read, but you should be able to find which tooltip is missing. Put your suggestion for a tooltip for that operator/property in the “Suggested tooltip #1” or “Suggested tooltip #2” column. When I’ve put it in Blender’s code (I’m working on a huge tooltip patch) I’ll mark it as done. After you have suggested a tooltip, post here saying what tooltip you suggested. That’s about it! I also included a bit of statistics at the top, because let’s face it, statistics are fun.
Here’s the document (Anyone can edit the suggestions cells, play nice!):
I can’t promise you a lot of fame and recognition, but if there are some people who write a lot of tooltips, I’ll mention them as coauthors when I submit the patch.
Excellent! I occasionally complain that Blender is not easy enough to learn. This is a straight-forward way to contribute to making it somewhat easier.
So far I added a tooltip for: Modifier – Array Offset object
So since I didn’t write this list (I only organized it), someone editing the spreadsheet and I (We’ll soon find out who) started to wonder if the constraints include bone constraints, or if the tooltips should be different. Does anyone know? Someone get a rigger in here.
I checked myself (that’s just as easy as asking :))
The constraints are exactly the same, as well as the tooltips. The only difference is that the object constraints work on objects and bone constraints work on bones.
Quite obvious actually.
I’m guessing the tooltips have the same source so that it only has to be implemented once for both types of constraints.
While checking I found a (very small) fault in one of the tooltips. The tooltip in the ‘Volume’ field in the ‘Maintain Volume’ constraint says ‘Volume of the bone at rest’.
Since this constraint can also be applied to objects, I think it should say: ‘Volume of the object at rest’. The word ‘object’ has a more general meaning and can also apply to bones.
Try my tooltips document. This includes all of the Blender 2.5 tooltips. Yellow titles show the source code path. Blue areas show the undocumented tooltips. You can easily filter tooltips type. I hope it’ll be helpful.
Click here for .xls version.
Click here for .ods version.
I’d just like to point out a little reminder for those of your working on creating these tooltips to avoid the trap of “mechanical documentation”.
For example, a while ago, I ran into a tooltip used for the influence vertexgroup field for modifiers which said something like “Vertex group name” (actually, checking now, a few still do that). This sort of documentation is frankly useless. If you’re looking at the tooltips, you’re doing so because you don’t know what something does and/or how to use it, but garbage text like this just states the obvious. Instead, do something like “Name of Vertex Group which determines influence of modifier per vertex”.
BTW, the current proposed tooltips for the constraint spaces (and a few others nearby) falls into this exact trap.
It would be great if you would suggest another one then, If you think those ones aren’t good enough. I know almost nothing about constraints, which is why I’m not writing them.
Sorry for no updates on this, I was really busy yesterday (18 hour day because of school :P) and today I’m almost as busy. Tomorrow evening at the latest (GMT +2) I will start inserting tooltips again.
Those are good, did someone integrate those into my spreadsheet? I noticed the number went way up. If you used a script to generate those we should maybe run it again after I finish this.
Will try to do some more tomorrow if it’s not all done by then.