NAME

Tk::Balloon - pop up help balloons.

SYNOPSIS



    use Tk::Balloon;
    ...
    $b = $top->Balloon(-statusbar => $status_bar_widget);
    $b->attach($widget,
               -balloonmsg => "Balloon help message",
               -statusmsg => "Status bar message");

DESCRIPTION

Balloon provides the framework to create and attach help balloons to various widgets so that when the mouse pauses over the widget for more than a specified amount of time, a help balloon is poppped up.

Balloon accepts all the options that the Frame widget accepts. In addition, the following options are also recognized.

-initwait
Specifies the amount of time to wait without activity before popping up a help balloon. Specified in milliseconds. Defaults to 350 milliseconds.
-state
Can be one of balloon, status, both or none indicating that the help balloon, status bar help, both or none respectively should be activated when the mouse pauses over the client widget.
-statusbar
Specifies the widget used to display the status message. This widget should accept the -text option and is typically a Label.

METHODS

The Balloon widget supports only two non-standard methods:
attach(widget, options)
Attaches the widget indicated by widget to the help system. The options can be:
-statusmsg
The argument is the message to be shown on the status bar when the mouse pauses over this client. If this is not specified, but -msg is specified then the message displayed on the status bar is the same as the argument for -msg.
-balloonmsg
The argument is the message to be displayed in the balloon that will be popped up when the mouse pauses over the client. As with -statusmsg if this is not specified, then it takes its value from the -msg specification as any. If neither -balloonmsg nor -msg are specified, then an empty balloon will be popped up... this is silly, but there it is.
-msg
The catch-all for -statusmsg and -balloonmsg. This is a convenient way of specifying the same message to be displayed in both the balloon and the status bar for the client.
detach(widget)
Detaches the specified widget widget from the help system.

AUTHOR

Rajappa Iyer rsi@ziplink.net

This code and documentation is derived from Balloon.tcl from the Tix4.0 distribution by Ioi Lam. This code may be redistributed under the same terms as Perl.