Re: desktop drag-n-drop

[Richard Kinder <rkinder cisco com>]

The idea sounds promising to me - how about some kind of visual hint 
when a file is dragging over the desktop. For example, if an RPM is 
being dragged on the desktop, some portion of the desktop changes to 
show the action to be performed (i'm thinking eye-candy here :). Based 
on the file type, several options may be available to the user through 
the small graphical hint box - the hint box cycles through the options, 
and the user 'drops' the file when the appropriate option is visible. 
Users could cause the options to cycle more rapidly by wiggling the 
mouse (or maybe even moving the mouse causes the options to cycle - the 
faster the mouse, the faster the options cycle).

This would have to be thought out more from an accessibility standpoint 
though.

Regards,
	Richard


Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 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.