Re: [Fwd: Re: File Selector talk notes -- one other suggestion]

[Bruce Robert Pocock <brpocock 10east com>]

On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 10:53, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 22:58, Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> OpenWindows took this one step further and had a drop target in every
> application window (well, most of them, not everybody cottoned on), into
> which you could drag files that were open in any other compatible
> application.  You could also drag files to and from the file manager, of
> course, to open/save them.
> 
> So if we're going down the drag-to-save route it's probably worth taking
> a step back and thinking about how we could make it more generically
> useful like OW did, rather than just concentrating on opening and saving
> files.

Disclaimer: never used OW.

Indigo Magic, the SGI desktop, did what sounds to me to the the same
thing. (I'm looking at the Irix 5.3 version, ca. 1994?, YMMV) What was
very impressive was their "desktop" files for everything - not just
files, and URL's, but also user accounts, groups, hosts, ...

It would be nice to make up a list of things that .desktop files and/or
magical MIME types could represent - e.g. perhaps the list of things
nsswitch can resolve (hosts, users, groups, ...)?

Just thinking toward the natural extension of direct manipulation: drag
a group onto a file to chgrp it, ...?

> Personal aside: the day anyone gives me a monitor big enough to have
> both my file manager and A.N.Other application open and visible at the
> same time is the day I start being enthusiastic about this idea :)

C'mon, the biggest monitor I have was a dumpster-dive rescue, and it's a
Sun :-)