Summary: The UltraMon utility by Realtime Soft, adds buttons that make managing applications on multiple monitor systems more efficient. Unfortunately, the default settings interfere with Rhino so Tooltips in cascaded toolbars do not display.

Don Lewis, a regular contributor to the Rhino newsgroup, has been frustrated by a problem we have not been able to fix in Rhino. Earlier today, he determined the cause of the problem and a work-around for it. He and others have been using a multiple screen management tool called UltraMon that adds buttons to the screen to efficiently manage applications on multiple monitor systems.

• UltraMon - Options - Buttons and Menu Commands:
  • Uncheck - Add Move Window button, and
  • Uncheck - Add Maximize to Desktop Button

Detail: I spoke with John Morse, the Rhino user interface developer, and he says that Rhino toolbars are “child windows”. When the mouse pointer hovers over an individual tool button, a timer is started. If the cursor does not move off the icon for the duration of the tooltip delay timer, then another child window is created and the tooltip information is displayed in this new, small, child window. It appears that UltraMon is also reading the mouse over event, but is not passing through the event information, so Rhino's tooltip delay timer never starts, so the tooltip is never displayed. It appears that disabling these two UltraMon controls makes it so the Rhino tooltip delay timer process works as it was intended.

This work around was confirmed by users running Rhinoceros Version 4 SR4b on both Vista 64 and 32-bit multiple monitor systems.

Thanks Don!

Created: 23 October 2008 - John Brock

This problem has apparently been fixed in the latest beta release of Ultramon Version 3.0.4 Beta.

Edited: 20 January 2009 - Don Lewis