Re: DragNDrop to an unopened folder (without springs) and a nice accessibility side-effect

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 10:11 -0400, Kevin C. Krinke wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 20:19 +0900, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 12:48 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> > > On Apr 4, 2005 12:55 PM, Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com> wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 10:19 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:

> 
> I feel this is fundamentally wrong. The user should never get into a
> situation where they are dragging around "a selection they never
> dropped". See my suggestions below.

Why? Do you have more than a feeling?

> This solves the problem of
> deciding whether or not the user used CTRL+C or CTRL+X to start the

There is no problem. The DnD becomes a cut/paste just as if you used the
menu.

> process and they get the benefit of being able to symlink the file or
> cancel the operation. 

Poping up the context menu is interesting, but that adds another step
that would make regular DnD more difficult, which I don't think should
be allowed. Better to ditch the whole thing than muck up the main use
case.

> 
> 
> Now if all this is patented in some way and thing are implemented as you
> suggest, I'd offer up another alternative...

All those examples include spring-loaded folders which won't be included
so long as they're patented.

> 
>     1) left-click on a file, 3sec, icon added to "clipboard"
>     2) find the desired folder for the operation
>     3) right-click|middle-click to have the drag-menu pop-up
> 
> Doing it this way ensures that the user isn't dragging around an icon
> all the time. Eventually they will want to right-click something and the
> drag-menu would pop up. (Perhaps the name of the file in the clipboard
> should appear in the list.)

If you replace right|middle with left that that is exactly what I
suggested in my first email. The popup should be avoided since it slows
down the normal DnD operation.
> 
> As one final suggestion... if the mouse is inactive for more than a
> minute (or some such gconf-set timeout) the clipboard is automatically
> cleared.

I thought so too, but I don't know the performance characteristics of
long lasting g_timeouts.

Thanks for the input.

Cheers,
Ryan