Balloon help

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System 7 Balloon Help in Eudora

Balloon help was a tooltips-type help system introduced by Apple Computer in their System 7 operating system release. The name referred to the way the help text was displayed, in "balloons", like those containing the words in a comic strip. The name has since been used by many to refer to any sort of pop-up help text.

1 Overview
2 Praise
3 Criticisms
4 Future Direction

[edit] Overview

During the leadup to System 7, Apple studied the problem of getting help in depth. They identified a number of common questions, such as where am I? and how do I get to...?. In the context of computer use they identified two main types of questions users asked; what is this thing? and how do I accomplish...?. Existing help systems typically didn't provide useful information on either of these topics, and were often nothing more than the paper manual copied into an electronic form.

One of the particularly thorny problems was the what is this thing question. In an interface that often included non-standard widgets or buttons labeled with an indecipherable icon, many functions required a trip to the manual to decipher. Users generally refused to do this, and ended up not using the full power of their applications due to many of its functions being "hidden" by unknown UI. It was this problem that Apple decided to attack, and after extensive testing, settled on Balloon Help as the solution.

The underlying system was based on a set of resources included in application software holding text that would appear in the balloons. The resources for the balloon animations and outlines were held in the operating system itself. Due to the balloons being implemented entirely as resources, they could be added easily using standard applications like ResEdit. Apple also supplied a custom editor application to improve the process, which displayed a list of only those objects that required balloons, and edited the text inside a balloon shape to give the developer some idea of that the resulting display would look like.

The engine would automatically display the proper balloon based on the mouse location and the item's current state. It also positioned the balloon using a clever algorithm to keep it away from the objects being examined. Help text for most common UI elements, such as the Close Box on a window, was built into the system. Developers could also include balloons for the application icon itself, allowing users to identify unknown applications in the Finder.

[edit] Praise

Developers were encouraged to include help text with a certain grammar, and not only name the object being looked at, but also explain to the user any state it might have. For instance, modern tooltips might say something like "copy" to explain a button, but Apple suggested the more detailed "Copies the selected text onto the clipboard," as well as a second version that added "Not available now because there is no selection." This sophisticated feature was invaluable for someone trying to understand why a particular menu item was greyed out. In this respect, balloons were far more helpful than modern tooltip systems, and helped users learn more about how their applications worked.

[edit] Criticisms

One oddity, likely historical in nature, is that Balloon Help was included in the very first versions of System 7, yet Apple's solution for how do I accomplish...? did not appear until the better part of a decade later. When it did appear, Apple Guide was certainly impressive, but the lengthy delay between the two releases meant that Apple's help solution was only half implemented for most of System 7's history.

Balloon help was ill received at the time it was implemented. It was terribly slow on low-end machines due to its "fancy graphics" (for the era), so slow that it was painful to use. Adding to this pain was the fact that the balloons would instantly appear, without any delay, meaning that simply moving the mouse around the display would often lead to a series of annoying pauses while the balloons popped up and disappeared again. Just as annoying was the fact that the balloons could only be turned on and off from a menu, making it somewhat frustrating when a user was attempting to identify a single object.

When one actually went through the trouble to turn on the balloons, users often found that the only items with balloons had obvious functions, like the close box or menu bar, as a result of poor developer support. This was particularly annoying because it was precisely those developers that used the most difficult to understand UI's that were most likely not to include balloons in their applications. This likely soured the experience of balloons more than any technical issue.

Although many considered balloon help a useless feature at the time, it seems clear that the problem was in the implementation and not the basic concept. Adding a short delay before displaying the balloon would have ensured that users got balloons only on the objects they were actually interested in, and not for every object as they moved the mouse. Another seemingly obvious improvement would be to turn on the balloons only while the Help key was held down (as the popular third-party Helium control panel allowed), or optionally to toggle them on and off with that key. The system should have also included some way to select what balloons would be displayed, allowing a user to turn off the "standard" ones he or she already knew. Just as useful would have been a way to turn on all the balloons on a window, illustrating all the widgets at once.

Oddly, these early criticisms did not seem to result in Apple fixing the problems. Instead they simply abandoned balloon help. It appears no development was put into it from its release in 1991 until its demise with the release of Mac OS X in 2001. During that period Microsoft introduced Tooltips, which offer many of the same benefits while avoiding many of its problems. A tooltips-like system was used in OpenStep and retained for Mac OS X, but lacks the functionality of balloons, arguable as they might be.

[edit] Future Direction

Ironically, the balloon help concept has since been adopted as an optional alternative to tooltips in later versions of Microsoft Windows, such as Windows XP, which uses balloons to highlight and explain aspects of various programs or operating system features. (See the TTS_BALLOON flag.)

Even though Apple has no plan to re-introduce balloon help to its operating system, it announced that Xcode 3.0 will use balloon-like shapes to deliver error messages during compilation. These balloons do not pop up during mouse-over, however.

Balloon help is also highly visible in the Squeak Smalltalk environment, in the Enlightenment window manager and in the AmigaOS's MUI.

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