Tooltips Need a Delay, and Then They Need to Skip It
A developer's fix for tooltips that appear instantly on mouse travel: add a 200ms delay, then a 300ms 'warm' window so subsequent tooltips open instantly. The article explains the pattern with React code and a Claude skill for auditing your own codebase.
A click is always intentional whereas a hover is not intentional.
- ProxCoques
It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.
- brixie
This looks it's describing the same technique as the last example in https://emilkowal.ski/ui/you-dont-need-animations (and that whole post is worth a read, I think, if you found this interesting).
It's such a small detail that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed (because I don't build animations, so it doesn't cross my mind), but now that I know about it, I think about it all the time.
- hurrell
I think I would describe this as an example of hysteresis. Neat!
- kazinator
Basically, have a global temperature. When the pointer is in something that has a tooltip, the temperature rises. Otherwise it cools (possibly at a different rate). A tooltip is shown only when the pointer is in bounds, and the temperature is above a certain threshold.
- compiler-guy
I greatly appreciate this attention to detail, and there isn't enough of this in the world. For example, in Visual Studio popups on hover happen so fast you can barely select anything, or you end up clicking on the popup instead of selecting a word.