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, was frustrated by a problem we have not been able to fix in Rhino. 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
  • 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 starts. 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 displays 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, and the tooltip is never displayed. It appears that disabling these two UltraMon controls makes the Rhino tooltip delay timer process works as it was intended.

Users running Rhinoceros Version 4 SR4b on both Vista 64- and 32-bit multiple monitor systems confirmed this work around.

Thanks Don!

-John Brock, 23 October 2008

The latest beta release of Ultramon Version 3.0.4 Beta apparently fixed this.

- Don Lewis, 20 January 2009