desktop drag-n-drop

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

Hello,

 I was thinking about the whole "Desktop Context" thing, and had a (not
likely) interesting idea.  Probably closer to "completely inane and
pointless."

 Dragging and dropping certain files to the Nautilus desktop could be
thought of as dropping into/onto the computer.  For example, if I drag
and dropped an image to my desktop, it could set it to my background,
instead of making an icon.  The same could be done for other
desktop-related document types, or perhaps system related document types
(for example, dropping an RPM on my desktop could attempt to install
it).

 Of course, this has several usability implications; it could become a
guess-and-find-out affair as to what packages the desktop handles
specially (for example, if users are used to dropping a program (a.k.a.
rpm) on their desktop to install it, they might assume dropping a source
tarball will install it, versus just making an icon).

 Also, users might not want the action to happen - for example, even if
I know that images dropped on the desktop become my background, I might
want to be able to add the icon to my desktop to the document instead.

 Those two issues pretty much make the whole idea useless (at least, I'm
not bright enough to think of ways around them), but the idea seemed it
might be interesting enough to garner some discussion.  I recall reading
that several other OS' (including MacOS X) doing something similar for
certain file types; not sure on that tho...

 If not using the desktop, then perhaps other kinds of special folders
could be used.  For example, if we have a system:// URI, and dropping
RPM's onto *that* attempts installation, a "My Computer" (or hopefully
something with a better name) icon for system:// could be on the
desktop, so I could just drop RPM's onto it.  Or something like that.
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.