A few weeks back I was looking for a nice simple way of adding tooltips to some buttons on a site – sometimes an image alone doesn’t quite convey what the button does in enough detail.

I found the excellent coda popup bubbles on jQuery for designers, this seemed to do everything I wanted it to, but it meant going through all of my html and adding an additional div with the popup content. That’s fine for me, but other developers are never going to remember to do this and we really want a consistent user interface.

A little bit more looking led to Web Designer Wall (#5 in the list). They have a very simple technique that pulls the Title text from an image and creates the popup out of this. All of dev’s are told to add title text to images so this was almost perfect. I say almost perfect because unlike the code bubbles the hover events queue up. This means that if you run you cursor back and forth over the buttons the popups keep firing for a few seconds/minutes after you stop.

So my final stop was to combine the two. I also incorporated any fixes I saw in the comments section of jQuery for Designers.

You can download the script here.

Or see a demo here.

The image file I use for the tooltips can be downloaded here, and is free for anyone to use.

My client was already including jQuery in their pages so it made sense to rewrite the javascript using jQuery. This also has the added benefit of meaning you no longer have to include the script inside the body tag to get it work in IE7.

While we were testing with users I also spotted a problem with some earlier versions of flash not showing the pictures. The simple but strange solution for this was to use two large images, instead of one small and one large. If you’re not worried about users with old versions of flash you can just use a 100px x 100px image instead of two 650px x 650px images.

You can download the script here.

Or see a demo here.

To use this script you need to edit the peel.js file and put the link and image paths in that you want to use, then put the following in the head of your page:

<script src="/pathtojquery/jquery-1.2.6.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/pathtopeel/peel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

That’s it. Just add those lines and the script does the rest. Obvisously change /pathtojquery/ to the path to jQuery for your site, and change /pathtopeel/to point to where you uploaded the peel.js file.