Along the same lines, I distinctly remember a feature that was being
demoed early on for OSX but which I think has been removed since.
The feature essentially applied drag & save using the titlebar icon as
the drag point. I believe this can also be done in Windows NT4 for
explorer windows.
Basically, the icon for a window corresponded to a drag point for the
file contained in that window.
(I'm not sure what the rationale for the removal was but I thought it
was very interesting.)
--Ben
On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 13:23, Luis Villa wrote:
> Luke H. sent some very cool feedback on the recent file select talk to
> me; I'm forwarding it for him.
> -----Forwarded Message-----
>
> [This message is kindly being forwarded to the desktop-devel-list for me
> by Luis Villa as I don't subscribe to the list.]
>
> I didn't notice any discussion about XDS (the FreeDesktop.org drag-save
> protocol for X) in the File Selector talk notes. Drag-saving is a
> feature which I believe will make the GNOME desktop far more intuitive
> and easy-to-use for many people.
>
> Please see the XDS (Driect Save Protocol) notes at:
>
> http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xds/
>
> This is the FreeDesktop.org proposed standard for "Saving Files Via
> Drag-and-Drop: The Direct Save Protocol for the X Window System". It is
> an extension of XDND. The concept comes originally from Acorn's RISC
> OS. It is one of those features that you simply don't know how you did
> without it once you've used it. You can be working on a document or
> drawing in one application, and then go "Save As..." and *drag* an icon
> across to an already-open file manager window, rather than navigating a
> (sometimes deep) directory heirarchy in the Save As box to find the same
> directory that you're already viewing in your file manager. It makes
> life so much easier, and makes the file manager far more useful, since
> most people only currently use their file manager for loading things,
> not saving things. It's nice to have a file manager window open on your
> desktop for all the different files in a project that you're working on,
> and to be able to both load things from it and save things to it, using
> different applications, without having to re-navigate the directory
> structure just to get there for each new application.
>
> Another very useful application of this is that you can drag the file
> icon from the Save As window *into* another application -- e.g. imagine
> editing an image in the Gimp, and then drag-saving it into an Open
> Office frame. It is much more visual than the Cut-Paste mechanism,
> which doesn't provide any user feedback as to what has happened to your
> data (the clipboard is usually invisible). The other great reason why
> this is a good idea is that you don't have to create a temporary file
> anywhere just to get your artwork across from the Gimp to OpenOffice (or
> between any other two drag-save-enabled applications). So there's one
> file-management task fewer to worry about.
>
> Because XDS is built on XDND, it shouldn't be too hard to add this
> functionality to GTK/GNOME. The main change is that a file icon
> (depicting the file type) would need to be added to a regular
> (Windows-like) file-save dialog box, perhaps with a label
> ("Alternatively: Drag icon to save" or something) above it to let people
> discover this functionality. If it's built into a regular file-save
> dialog, then we can still operate the old way, or use drag-saving,
> depending on which is better for the situation.
>
> Thomas Leonard of the ROX project ( http://rox.sourceforge.net ) can
> fill you in on more of the details I'm sure, since the ROX Filer and
> other ROX apps already implement XDS AFAIK. I believe he subscribes to
> this list.
>
> Thanks,
> Luke Hutchison.
>
>
>
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>
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