Re: Temporarily open folders on drag-and-drop

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

Hi again all,

I now understand a little better what these springloaded folders do,
and I can agree that they seem cool. I also understand that many
people still hope for and want them, however that was not necessarily
what I need. I can make do with something much more simple, although
it may not have the same coolness factor - I'm of a pretty practical
mind, I like to get things done with a minimum of effort - also called
laziness. ;-)

For me, it would be well enough with a context-like menu, showing a
list of folder names, and which could be traversed hierachially if
there are subfolders. Not as cool, but pretty effective. Of course, I
wouldn't at all mind if it looked pretty too. :) Would something like
that affect any patents?

I was looking into how nautilus extensions myself to see if it could
easily be implemented that way, but from what I could see in the docs
I found it isn't possible to trap drags/hovers and not possible to for
instance replace the context menu, only add to it. Is this correct?

The minimial behaviour I would like is (something like) this:

* Drag file(s) over a folder
* Context menu pops up showing subfolders, if any
* Holding the drag, this menu can be traversed and files can be
dropped by releasing, as usual
* Subfolders containing yet more subfolders have the little arrow
marking as per usual and open on hover
* Optionally, other files could also be shown in the menu, but at
least for me that is not necessary.

Also, as an added bonus, I could really use a behaviour such as this
when hovering without dragging, instead of opening folders I'd instead
get a menu to navigate to the folder I actually want to open, which is
a bit further down.

Also, remember that a lot of this has desktop first and foremost in
mind, that's where I personally could use it the most, although I
could see it useful almost anywhere where there's a few levels down to
traverse...

-- Stoffe




On 1/2/06, Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org> wrote:
> Am Montag, den 02.01.2006, 20:30 +0100 schrieb David Christian Berg:
> > On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 11:07 -0800, Jason Day wrote:
> > > Let me add one more thing. The patent describes a method where the
> > > enclosures are "sprung open" temporarily and closed when the drag is
> > > complete. If you apply this to the spatial mode, it could be very
> > > questionable, especially if you close the intermediate windows,
> > > afterward. I don't think that it should be any trouble at all in
> > > browser mode, especially if you remain in the destination at the end
> > > of the drag.
> >
> > This whole discussion come up every now and then. If I knew a first
> > thing about coding, I'd already have implemented for myself and shared
> > the code with friends.
> > I'd also think that the apple patent does not apply to what we call
> > spring open folders.
>
> "I'd also think" doesn't help here. Lawyers are very sophistic(ated) wrt
> positive right.
>
> > It's a _very_ handy feature and Gnome would gain a lot, as I agree. We
> > might want to be careful to place it outside of the US to start with and
> > see, if there's any action taken by Apple.
> >
> > Hope this is the last time, this is being discussed and that finally we
> > get the spring open folders :)
>
> You may want to refer to [1], it contains a proposed patch. We also had
> a subsequent discussion on the mailing list [2].
>
> [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44001
> [2]
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2005-September/msg00003.html
>
> --
> Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>
>
>
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>


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