Re: drag and drop saving.

["Dr. David Gilbert" <gilbertd treblig org>]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Calum Benson wrote:

> Well, I haven't been able to dig out any usability studies so far.
> However, the feature was/is certainly very popular with OpenWindows
> users; once you establish the convention, it's easy to learn and
> remember.  It's clearly there because it's often hard to find something
> draggable that represents the whole document/appointment/mail-message,
> and the
> drop target means that the entire window doesn't have to be listening
> for drop requests.

A machine mostly available in the UK; the Acorn Archimedes had
drag-and-drop saving but in a different way to OpenWindows.  You still
clicked 'save' on a menu to save but you were presented with a window with
a draggable icon and an entry box in which you could type in the leaf
name.  Having typed in the leafname you could then drag the icon to a
filemanager (or just hit return to save with the same name, or just type
the whole path in).  It worked a treat and meant that you didn't have to
have the directory navigator in the save box.

(You could also drop it onto other applications; so you could draw a
diagram in a drawing package and then go to 'save' and drop the icon into
the middle of a document in your DTP package with the diagram never
hitting disc inbetween).

Dave

-- 
/------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Dr. David Alan Gilbert |                                         |
| -------- G7FHJ --------|---------------------------------------- |
| Home: dave treblig org            http://www.treblig.org         |
\------------------------------------------------------------------/