Re: What do you call something?

[Clayton Oliver <coliver -at- lexmark -dot- com>]

Quoth Tammy Van Boening:
> Okay, you know how, for example, like in cartoons, when a character 
talks,
> the words are contained in some kind of like balloon type object   - 
anyway,
> they are surrounded with a semi-oval shape border with a pointed end 
that
> points to the character's mouth -
> 
> what on earth would you call that in documentation? Please no joke - I 
have
> several of these to describe - different colored ones mean different 
things
> and rather than writing the red
> "thing-a-ma-jig/doodad/whatchyamacallit/doohickey" means this, I would 
like
> to say the red <insert object name here> indicates that this is a 
warning,
> the green < > means this has been processed, etc.

I'd go with "balloon" or "bubble."  FWIW, Microsoft uses a similar device 
in the Windows UI for alerts coming from the taskbar's notification area, 
and the MSDN documentation refers to these as "balloons" 
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511451.aspx).

- C.

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