At least the second point of criticism has changed with the discovery of Visual Tooltip. That application is using less than 4 Megabytes of memory when its actively running which is pretty good for such a software.

Visual Tooltip does not need to be installed and can be run from the directory it was unpacked to. It adds an icon to the Windows system tray which offers access to the program’s options which are opened automatically during first start.

It basically provides two features for Windows XP and Windows Vista users. The first is the known visual tooltip that appears when the mouse cursor is moved over an item in the taskbar, the second and far more interesting is the so called dock that can contain several of the opened folders and applications displaying a small thumbnail of them that gets updated frequently.

That’s an interesting option for users that run programs that change their appearance – slightly – whenever information are updated, say a torrent download or rendering finishes. This can be seen eventually in the thumbnails of the dock. The dock can be placed freely on the screen but seems to be always on top of everything else except for full screen applications.

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These Windows Explorer tooltips can be customized in the Registry to display the information selected by the user. It is possible to remove information and add new as well. Windows uses a general setting for all files that do not have their own tooltip information. Those tooltips display the Type, Author, Title, Subject, Comments, last Write access and the Size.

Open the Registry (Windows R, type regedit, hit enter) and navigate to the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*. The right pane should contain a key called InfoTip which begins with prop: and then the variables that are currently shown in the tooltip. Just remove an entry if you do not need it or add another one currently not listed.

A setting in the Folder Options menu which can be accessed by clicking on Tools in Windows Explorer activates or disables those tooltips. A click on Tools > Folder Options > View opens the configuration menu. Search for the entry “Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items” and check it to activate the setting.

Here is a list of all available general tooltip variables. Make sure your setup looks like this afterwards. The variable on the left will be displayed in the first line and each variable will be placed in a row beneath afterwards.

prop:variable1;variable2;variable3

• Accessed
• Attributes
• Created
• DocAuthor
• DocComments
• DocSubject
• DocTitle
• Modified
• Name
• Size
• Type
• Write

Customize tooltips for specific file types:

The general setting only works if no custom tooltip is defined for a file type. To lookup a specific file type you have to select the file type in the same Registry key, for example .bat. Check the right pane again and take a look at the default key, remember the Data entry which in the case of .bat files is batfile.

Now scroll down and look for the batfile entry in the same Registry structure. Click on the entry and take a look at the right pane. If no InfoTip key is visible the file extension uses the general tooltips. If you want to change that create a string InfoTip and add the variables that you would like to it. Remember to begin with prop:

Customize tooltips for multimedia file types:

Multimedia files are special because their tooltips can be changed in either one of the entries below:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\audio
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\image
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\video

Just click on an entry and select the InfoTip from the right pane. You might realize that those entries contain additional variables that can be used. The video InfoTip setting for instance contains those additional variables:

EpisodeName, ProgramDescription, Duration, Bitrate, Dimensions, Protected

For audio files those are:

artist, album, year, track, duration, type, bitrate and protected

And for images:

Dimensions, WhenTaken, CameraModel

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