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. > > > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-devel-list mailing list > desktop-devel-list gnome org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list >
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