more on gui piping

[charles j hagenbuch williams edu]

Sorry to keep spewing large chunks of my mind at gnome-list, but I just had
another thought, and it belongs in a seperate message than my last.

Drag and drop is a wonderful thing, but people have pointed out that in some
cases it is simply not intuitive to people who haven't used a computer
before. I think I just figured out (part of) why:

For many tools that we are used to using, the metaphor is backwards.

Think of a paintbrush. You don't drag your house to the paintbrush to turn
it blue. You take the brush to the house.

In the context of graphics files conversion, this would equate to picking up
convert, "dipping" it into the can that is jpeg conversion, and "painting"
all of the files that you wanted converted.

More down to earth: you have an icon on your desktop that represents, for
instance, convert. You click on it to "pick up" the convert icon. First a
dialog appears that lets you set the behavior of convert (ie, what format to
convert to and what other operations to perform. You could also skip this by
saving settings for a "brush" and having them be the default). Then the
cursor changes to represent the action you're performing (this time it's
appropriate), and you then select all of the files you want to convert with
the cursor (probably simply by clicking - you shouldn't have to drag over
them, so you can operate on files in different windows easily). Then you hit
a key or perform some sort of trigger, and the action happens.

We could call it "Desktop Painting." I don't know if it could co-exist with
my last idea, but either/both would significantly enhance any desktop, I
think. Please, let me know what you think of this.

-chuck

p.s. If anyone has gotten active tags working with Eterm DR0.8-PL3, and is
willing to tell me how, please mail me privately.

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chagenbu@wso.williams.edu>, http://osmos.ml.org
--
"sleep comes from acorns." - jess