Temporarily open folders on drag-and-drop

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

Hiya,

didn't find anything about this via Google, so I thought I'd
ask/suggest this to the list.

I often drag and drop things to folders on my desktop, but even more
often I want to reach some subfolder within. And no, I don't want to
have all these folders on my desktop even though they are commonly
accessed. ;-) And, I don't want to pre-open folders unnecessarily,
partly because I think there's too many steps involved, partly because
I always forget until mid-drag hehe. =)

So, I've often of late come to think that it would be excellent if
hovering over the folder let me access the subfolders too. Simplest
case would of course be to actually open the folders after a little
hovering. Spatial Nautilus in list mode does this but that is a
special case as it doesn't open tons of windows. And what do we do
with those windows afterwards? Close or leave? More importantly, I'd
really like for this to work on the desktop, which I don't want to run
in list mode even if it is possible (is it? =).

Another possibility would be to show a dropdown, more or less
menu-style, which could be navigated hierarchically by simply moving
the mouse cursor. Now that would be ease-of-use, at least to me.

Sample use cases:

I download say a free song from some page, say from Machiane
Supremacy, to the Desktop and play it. It's good, so I decide it's a
keeper. I drag the file to the volume icon "Media", which then shows a
dropdown of Movies, Music, and a few more. I move the pointer down to
Music, which expands into more subcategories, and so on, until I get
to the one I want, where I drop it.

I download the latest update to a PDF book I own, say "Programming
Ruby". I just save it to the Desktop, because that is my default save
location, I'm lazy, and the "other folders" mechanism of Gnome is
really clumpsy IMO and I have too many potential targets to use
bookmarks for everything. This one I know I'm gonna keep, so I'll just
move it to the correct place right away, and same thing there:
Documents->Books->Ruby in the menu, question "Do you want to replace"
and I'm done.

There's tons of these examples, I use the Desktop quite a lot.
Actually, come to think of it, I wouldn't mind if I could navigate to
and open a folder this way either, instead of opening parents along
the way. Like I said eariler, I don't want my Desktop filled with
folders (or shortcuts) either.

Well, that is one idea at least. Has this been thought of and
dismissed earlier, or does it seem to have any problems? I'd file a
bug if it was a good idea, but I don't know that for sure. ;-)


-- Stoffe

--
Kristoffer Lundén
✉ kristoffer lunden gmail com
✉ kristoffer lunden gamemaker nu
http://www.gamemaker.nu/
☎ 0704 48 98 77