Creating Easy Flash-Style Tooltips

From Adrien-Luc Sanders, former About.com Guide

Ever seen those tooltips that, when you roll over highlighted text or graphics, open as a small box containing extra information--text, images, links? Simple ones can be created via DHTML and Javascripts, but for more graphically rich options, you can always turn to Flash. You can create a circular tooltip, a gradient one, even a tooltip with its own miniature web design layout. The only limit is what you can draw in Flash--or import from outside.

I’ve seen several tutorials that involve twenty lines of ActionScripting for one little popup window, but I thought I’d simplify it a bit so that all it takes is a basic to intermediate knowledge of Flash and only a few lines of scripting. We’ll be creating a fixed tooltip--one that opens in the same position rather than following the mouse--that appears when the mouse moves over the appropriate text, and disappears when the mouse rolls out.

For this tutorial, I’m going to be creating a tooltip that contains information on the highlighted Lorem Ipsum text.

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