Balloon Help
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Ballonhelp_in_taskbar_w81.png)
A Balloon Help is a thought bubbles like element in a graphical user interface , which appears when the user with the mouse pointer over a specific period of a button lingers.
Balloon Help was developed by Apple Inc. , which introduced it in 1991 with their System 7 . After activation, the balloon help offered an explanation of a surface element that was hovered over with the mouse. The explanation is one or two sentences long. This was useful for beginners who wanted to learn a program, but it was completely unsuitable for everyday use, as the speech bubble took up too much space. As a result, many users switched them off completely very quickly, which led to some functionalities being forgotten.
Because of these serious disadvantages, tooltips were developed to correct these disadvantages.