[gnome-love] New feature

[Luke Hutchison <lukeh email com>]

I have a very simple feature I would like to see added to GNOME which I
believe will add great power to the interface, but I have been unable to
track down someone interested in implementing it, and I don't have time
to myself.  In fact I don't just believe that it will add great power to
the UI, I know, because I have used this feature for a few years in
Acorn RISC OS.  Once you've used it you'll wonder how you ever did
without it.  Whom can I contact about at least building a prototype to
see if it's something that the community wants?  The feature is as
follows:

Quite simply, a file icon is added to the Save As dialog box which may
be dragged to
    (a) a File Manager window, or
    (b) another application.

In the case of (a), if you already have a File Manager window open
somewhere that is viewing the directory you want to save the file to (a
very common occurrence), why should you have to navigate the entire
directory-structure using the Save As dialog box, in order to find the
same directory again?  It's right there in your open FM window, and you
might have to navigate 10 levels deep of directories to find it again--
all for no reason.  Just Drag'n'Drop--that's what it's for in the first
place.

In the case of (b), I can't begin to tell you how useful this is.
Imagine editing a drawing in SodiPodi then saving it directly into a
specific frame of a DTP document by drag'n'drop, no intermediate save
necessary.  Then drop an image from the GIMP in, again by dragging
across from the Save As box.  You don't like the DTP program's text
editor so you use your favourite GNOME editor and save the text straight
into the text frame when done.   Of course you can do all this with
Copy/Paste (or you'd hope you could), but the main problem with this
mechanism is that there's usually no visual feedback as to what has
happened when the selected item is copied, which makes it hard for some
new users to work out what has happened, as the state of something
hidden (the clipboard) has changed.  From experience I can tell you that
once you get this drag-save feature in a desktop it will redefine the
meaning of "Drag'n'Drop" for you, you will be draggin' and droppin' all
over the place and you'll create far fewer intermediate files.

Please could someone give this a chance and try producing a prototype,
or direct me to someone who will.  I would do it if I had time, but
unfortunately I don't as I'm moving country.

Thanks in advance,

Luke Hutchison.

P.S. Another couple of features I'd like to see in the Save As box are a
"Save selection only" option (think of how powerful that would be in
combination with the above feature) and a way of specifying an email
address rather than a destination directory, so that all GNOME apps are
email-send enabled (pretty useful feature these days I'd say)...  I
realize though that visual clutter must be absolutely minimized.
Perhaps "Send as Email" could be a button on the side like the "Home"
etc. buttons in Ximian GNOME 1.4.  Then the Save entry in the File menu
could be renamed to "Save/Send"...  Just a thought...