IMatch main window "covers" the Viewer when mouse is hovered in Category Panel

[Tveloso]

With the IMatch Main Window maximized, and the Viewer set to Full-Screen mode (F12,F), and set to open on the same monitor as the IMatch main window, with the Annotations (T,A) and Category (T,E) Panels open, hovering the mouse pointer over the ribbon icons causes the IMatch main window to appear on top of the viewer.  

The IMatch main window does not take the focus though...the Viewer still has focus (I can just see a sliver of the bottom of the film strip, and the Viewer's Status Bar, below the IMatch Main Window's Status bar), and I can see that I'm still able to navigate the film strip with the arrow keys.  But the IMatch main window has completely covered the Viewer.

This behavior is not new with the introduction of Ribbons.  I noticed this also in older versions of IMatch.  I would occasionally open the Category Panel in the Viewer, in order to assign a particular Keyword to an image while it was "fresh on my mind", and occasionally, as I moved my mouse pointer near the top of the  Category Panel (but not yet in its toolbar), this same thing would happen, and I would have to Alt+Tab (twice) to get back to the Viewer.  

The "hover area" that causes this behavior now seems to be restricted to the area of the Ribbon (which is two rows of icons in my Viewer layout), but I'm quite sure that the very top of the Category Tree used to be part of triggering this behavior prior to the introduction of Ribbons.

[Mario]

I cannot reproduce this. Tried it both on my desktop PC, my laptop and in a fresh Windows 11 VM.
I enabled both panels, and then moved the mouse over the toolbars and the upper areas of the panels. Added and removed some categories. Worked with layers in the annotation panel etc. Always returning to the ribbon/top area, hovering etc.

Also tried with the Viewer on my second monitor. This was never reported before, AFAIK.

Are there any special steps or sequence of operations that causes this?
Does this happen all the time or just some times?
Do you use applications/tools which may cause this, e.g. screen recorders, assistive technology, AutoHotKey etc?

[Mario]

Hah, we're lucky.

While looking into today's bug report, I've experienced the problem you're describing once.
Closing the Viewer and re-opening it did not repeat the problem that the main window is pulled in front of the Viewer.
Restarting IMatch neither.
So I tried and tried and followed a hunch that this caused by the ribbon tooltip. When it pops up, it tells Windows that it wants to show on top of its parent window (the ribbon). Otherwise it would be invisible.
And this, sometimes, caused the IMatch main window to move in front of the Viewer. Very strange.

The Viewer is a strange construction, because of the way it can be full-screen, a window, docked or a panel. I think I shall do a poll to see which of these modes are actually used. Full-screen and window, I believe.

Anyways, after trying many things, googling a long time, I found a rather mysterious combination of Windows "flags" that prevent this from happening when the tooltip asks Windows to place it in front of it's parent window. The tooltip still shows correctly (even in the Viewer), but the main window no longer pops up. When I remove the flag combination, I can reproduce it at least once in a while. With the flags in place, I cannot.

Hope this works for you too.
What puzzles me is that you also experienced this with the regular (3rd party) toolbars IMatch uses when experimental features are off. Or when the mouse cursor is not in the ribbon.
Let me know if you can still reproduce this with the next IMatch release

[Tveloso]

Thank you so much Mario!

I wondered if it might in fact be somehow related to tooltip processing (the timing of the IMatch main window "popping up" felt similar to when/how a tooltip should pop up).

I didn't actually test with experimental mode turned off (I'll try that and will let you know).  I just recall having seen this behavior before (in IMatch versions prior to 2023 also)...but I don't often have the Categories Panel open in the Viewer, so it's been a while since I've seen it.

Thanks again for the fix, and for the fantastic support.

[Tveloso]

I just wanted to report back about my tests of this effect with Experimental Features turned off.

I could not reproduce it that way. I tried hovering my mouse cursor over many points in the general areas (below the toolbars) where I recall this happening in IMatch versions prior to 2023, and also in the toolbars themselves, but was not able to get the main IMatch window to pop up as it does with the Ribbon.

With the ribbons active, it does this consistently for me, and it seems to happen only with the ribbon icons in the Viewer's Category Panel...(the Annotations Panel to its left, puts up tooltips as expected).

I'll report back after the nex IMatch Release comes out...

[Mario]

It was definitely the tooltip that caused issues with the Viewer overlay window. Should be working just fine with the next release.

[Tveloso]

IMatch 2023.7.2 does indeed fix this issue for the ribbons, but as discussed in this post:

https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?msg=98426

...it actually does happen in the Category Tree itself (and continues to happen there under 2023.7.2) when the Category Name needs to be displayed in a ToolTip (because the entire name is not visible due to the size of the Panel).  I probably just didn't have that condition during my previous test, so could not reproduce it for that reason.

[Mario]

Mhm, that's something totally different!

IMatch controls only the tooltip in the ribbon. The tooltips in tree controls are created and managed by the 3rd party user interface toolkit I use, or by Windows, if it's a standard tree control...

Not sure if I can do anything about this then.
If you have very long category names, I suggest you make the category panel in the Viewer wider so that not tooltip needs to be displayed - as a work-around.