The help balloon was an early desktop assistance tool that allowed users to ask questions and receive answers from embedded help files. Apple introduced Balloon Help in the 1980s, which provided more detailed explanations. While some users appreciated the feature, others found it slow and resource-intensive. Microsoft has since incorporated and refined the concept into their help functionality.
One of the first innovations in desktop help assistance tools, the help balloon was a fun and simple visual tool that allowed users to ask a question about some aspect of a particular program and get an answer from the embedded help files included in the software . The tool’s designation as a help balloon was due to the help balloon’s visual similarity to balloons commonly used in comics to provide a visual image of the words spoken by the characters in the cartoon panel. Designed to be fun to use as well as providing simple to understand answers, the help bubble has been praised by some users and panned by others.
One of the earliest examples of balloon help functionality in software was Balloon Help, which Apple introduced in the System 7 operating system in the 1980s. The idea was to make it possible to move a cursor over a button or icon on a toolbar and learn more about what the button would do. The explanation would go a little further than a brief one-word description, which was comforting and helpful to people who were just starting to get used to using the new personal computer technology. Instead of learning that a particular icon was meant to allow copying, the help bubble could go on to explain that the button was for copying selected text to the clipboard. Rather than simply identifying a button as a paste function, Balloon Help would go a little further and claim that the button would allow any text currently on the clipboard to be pasted into a document.
While some users appreciated this feature, others complained that the help balloon feature was slow to use, took up a lot of system resources, and sometimes locked up the computer, making it necessary to shut down the hard drive and restart the system. In the case of the Apple version of Help Comics, it appears that no improvements have been made to the feature, and as of 2001, Help Comics was no longer available on Apple operating systems.
Over the years, the help balloon concept has been incorporated and refined into Microsoft’s help functionality and seems to not experience the same level of problems as Apple’s previous approach. As a general computer help tool, the help bubble continues to provide a quick and easy way to learn more about a particular function with a simple mouse movement.
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