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Fold 'n' Drop Window Interaction
Mints writes "Following up on recent "Desktop Innovation" stories that have left some disappointed, I thought Pierre Dragicevic's exploration of Fold 'n' Drop warranted mention. Described as "a new interaction technique for seamlessly dragging and dropping between overlapping windows", Fold 'n' Drop allows the user to interact with layered or overlapping windows in a very intuitive manner. Refreshingly, Mr. Dragicevic provides both a sample implementation, in Java, and video demos. Mr. Dragicevic is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Intuilab, Toulouse."
In my experience, few things can improve on keyboard shortcuts for navigating between windows depending on the amount of windows open. Reaching for the mouse just adds more time.
So THAT'S what the backs of windows look like.
Will it run in linux?
MS begrudgingly announced tabbed browsing for IE7, after claiming that it would confuse users.
Bring this to KDE/Gnome and there's one less reason for anyone above a "ma and popo" level to stick with Windoze.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
mirror anyone?
Kind of neat. My only comments thus far is that if you "discard" a window (fold it all the way over so that it dissappears off the screen) there's no easy way to get it back without dropping the object your dragging first. Similarly, it's too easy to folder over too many windows, by accident.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Pretty cool, not sure if it's something Joe Blow is going to take advantage of though.
But for us linux nerds, here's the plan:
1. Add mouse gestures to the OpenGL-powered X server (XGL)
2. Get story posted on Slashdot
3. Survive Slashdot effect and provide working download links
4. ????????
5. Profit!!!!
Huh? I was expecting an article on laptops.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
If you ask me, it'd be much easier to use Ctrl+C and then navigate where you want to go and use Ctrl+V. It's difficult to hold down the mouse button while violently jerking the mouse back and forth to get to the right window.
Don't get me wrong, it looks really neat, but it's not terribly useful. Sounds like the kind of thing that would fit GREAT in Longhorn.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/bf5e7607538684c45 385314562c610b0/index.html
so drop it in the dumpster and get a new one I guess.
On Mac OS X, we can do this with Exposé. Start a drag, move the mouse to a hot corner, drag over the formerly-obscured window...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I didn't get it at first. I tried the .jar file and made something happen, but couldn't replicate it - then I saw the video. *VERY* neat idea. It would be fantastic if this could be something integrated into KDE4. (Wishful thinking, I know, but wouldn't be impossible. Having something like this integrated into a mainstream (well, sort of!) desktop years ahead of MS/Apple would be great. Of course, what will happen is that Apple will put this in the next OS release next year, then KDE and Gnome will both have half-baked imitations 6 months later (if that). I'm a KDE user, and would love to see this - I just think it won't happen. :/
creation science book
Tried the Java demo. It's a neat idea. It takes a minute or to to get used to it, but then it starts to feel as natural as clearing off your desk with the back of your hand when you and the secretary need someplace to ... well, put something down.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
However even though the creator shows some relatively speedy interaction at the end - is this really better than these?:
I thought we were moving away from a directory structure anyway and into a more Spotlight-ish content-based search structure, conceptually?
Unlike most drag and drop implementations this lacks the ability to abort with the escape key. Surely would be in any real implementation, but would help the demo gain points in my book.
Thank you. I will be announcing my API Real Soon Now.
I think Apple's existing implementation of Expose is quite powerful. Not everyone realizes that drag-and-drop works with it, and more unfortunately Apple does not default to using a "screen corner" to activate Expose (yet this, too, is possible).
I have it set up so that I can literally "yank" the mouse in the general direction of the lower-right corner to show all windows, perhaps after picking up a file with the mouse. This then allows me to drag the file to any window. Further, I can use spacebar (like in spring-loaded folders in the Finder) to immediately choose a window instead of pausing for a second to have it selected automatically.
This action is so natural and powerful, I use it all the time. And though I use Linux at work and it is fantastic in many ways, I sorely miss features like Expose in Mac OS X.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
On windows, we can do this with the start bar.
Start a drag, move the mouse down to the title of the window on the start bar, drag over the formerly-obscured window.
It's always nice to see new ways to interact, but I can't recall a single time this would have been useful in the past week. My memory can't recall much more than that, but the folding corners would certainly annoy me more often than it would actually be useful.
I found the demo to be a little clunky, but he did have to implement it himself.
Once I figured out how it was worked, I found myself wondering how useful it would be to be able to just fold back the corners of a window when I wasn't dragging a file.
The general idea of peeling back the corner of a window seems like it might be actually useful at times. Sometimes the rigidly rectangular window can get in the way.
Of course, I'm sure it would eat CPU like all graphical candy, but cycles are cheap I guess.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
yeah designing 3-d models is great fun with the keyboard.
Combine this with some kind of hand gesture sensors (yes a mouse is one but I mean more complex) a la Minority Report and you would have a very intuitive "virtual paper" interface. This looks like it will be very handy (no pun intended) for use with a mouse but I think using more complicated hand gestures (in the future, when possible) will really make this paper-like manipulation of windows even more intuitive and useful. Funny how the further we move away from paperwork, the closer we get to being just like it.
Seriously, if you still have both hands, you don't need this. At least not under Windows. While dragging, you can still press Alt+Tab or Win+D (Desktop), so you should be able to get everywhere you want to.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
OK this is retarded, someone is just trying to make another stupid pretty UI. Drag your file over the taskbard, over the folder you want to dump it in, this window will become active and dominant, prepare to dump your file without 5 rediculous folds. come on people.
Does this mean that a "Bill Gates Breaks Windows" screensaver is in the works? :P
No one said anything about designing anything. I'm talking specifically about navigation between open windows. Learn to read.
Did you just compare Expose to dragging things to the task bar???
Lame...
I'll admit that it is very pretty looking and continues the whole desktop idea.
How about a, near, one time use tablet PC, lets call it paper, comes with number of user specified styli. You can sort it easily, put it in folders, filing cabinets, even on microfiche for high capacity storage. It is a 2D device that you can interact with in your 3D environment. Doesn't even need a jacked up graphics card. You can buy very cheap extensions that will allow support up however many bloody colours they have in the shop. Advaced users can create 3D models with it. Comes in packs called reams.....
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
Sure this is a great idea, it's intuitive and cool and could be implemented by folding or transparencies or by rolling, etc.... But if they decide to patent it then no one will be able to use it except microsoft, cause they'll pay the licensing fees... if they even bother or want to implement it.
On OSX I've ben doing this for ages.
Excersize:
Step one:open two windows
Step two: select a file in window "A" and drag over window "B" (which is overlapped and beneath window "A")
Step three: Wait half a second for window "B" become the modal window and release.
Step four: ???
Step five: PROFIT!!!!
Perhaps next time you get some wild idea about a revolution in user interaction, you head on over to the Apple store first.
If you look at the pics which illustrate this ground breaking idea -- it does what OS X already does, except OS X doesn't bother with "folding" or "bending" the window, it's just makes it modal (brings it to front) to let you know it's ready to recieve your interaction. Combined with a Apple+`, you can cycle through a large amount of windows dragging and dropping between them. The "folding" effect looks like nothing more than a cheap gimmick that would only chew up cpu/gpu cycles. Sorta like OS X's "genie effect" for window minimizing -- which is always the first thing I disable on a new Mac.
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft's way is the worst:
I would rather have Nestle Toll house Human-Cookie interaction.
... I find a sharp blow to the Solar Plexus will also produce a satisfying fold and drop.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
For navigating between already-open windows, when you have more than, say, 4 apps open, I've not seen any keyboard-only technique (or any other technique) that comes anywhere close to the speed of navgation via Expose on OSX (which uses mouse-only or mouse+keystroke) (Expose = mouseclick or keystroke reveals all open windows and lets you choose between them quickly) if you know of a faster keyboard technique, please do tell.. and I'll use it. (but.. before osx i was w/ you.)
I already use PopMouse (sorry, product is now retired... no link) which, Opera-like, adds mouse navigation to the Windows environment. I'll tell you, it's THE most beneficial add-on I've ever used!
However, PopMouse uses easy-to-remember and -use mouse movements, some of which have been usurped by this "batch".
Besides... Fold-and-drop? How about drag icon to task bar, hover over proper window, and drop it when the window opens?
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
So when was the last time you used a keyboard shortcut to drag and drop something?
This isn't merely for switching between windows. If you can't RTFArticle, then RTFSummary at least.
Nothing beats efficient file management (save perhaps sorting pictures with thumbnails) than using a CLI.
Yeah, actually, it is. Since you're always working one of three planes, it's quite easy--not much different than working on just one 2D plane at all.
It's not like it's possible to work on a 3D model directly with a mouse, either, for most things, that is.. You use the same 3 planes, just the same way, pretty much regardless of what programs you use.
I designed an entire house in AutoCad using mostly a keyboard and some notes, and a bit of memory on my behalf.
Today I use a hybrid approach. It's quick to pick points and lines and stuff with a mouse, and quicker to type the command and it's available parameters than ferret around with the stupid menus and hordes of completely un-intuitive buttons with even more unintuitive sub-buttons.
... the guy who came up with that (pun intented) was a pr0n junkie? Got to keep the left hand handy (pun again ;)...
Mind the frickin' laser...
The link to mplayerhq.hu is refusing connections.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Looking at the video, I'm struck again by how ill-fitting the "window" metaphor is. "Leafing through windows"?? Come on -- the model here is the page or the sheet.
Maybe it was never very appropriate. Windows and icons and menus... on desktops?? Oh my!
uhh. the taskbar? You dont even need to move your mouse/click a key to see all open windows, you have them right there in your taskbar.
I'm not positive how Expose looks or works within OSX but the way you describe sounds much like my Alt-Tab in XP (not the standard one--it is one of the Microsoft extensions/plus/whatever). Alt-Tab pops up a quick list of all open windows with a small preview of the window contents. Easy to tap the tab and flip between them.
Windows's taskbar already lets me drag and drop amongst arbitrary windows. You just drag the stuff to the task's button on the taskbar, wait till it goes foreground, then you drop it wherever you want.
I usually have more than 10 windows open, I don't want to waste time peeling through them one by one, especially when I know exactly which window it is (I just recently clicked its task button after all).
Once I have a taskbar, I don't often have to remember which windows are "below" or "above" each other. I just need to remember which task button represents the window to get to it.
Which comes to a related point - KDE orders the tasks on the taskbar top to bottom, left to right. This means that if you remove a task, the ALL of the tasks to the right of it will change their vertical positions. This is bad UI IMO. However the person in charge prefers it the way it is[1].
Windows does it left to right first then top to bottom. This means that only leftmost and rightmost tasks change positions if you remove one, so it's not as much of a mess trying to remember where a window is.
[1] Nope he doesn't go check with the "people in charge of Usability", because there aren't any. Which probably explains why Linux still has a mediocre GUI in terms of usability.
Heh, I just tried the OriMado implementation for Win XP that's linked to on that page.
It doesn't work perfectly, but it was enough to totally freak my sysadmin out when I called him over.
"My windows are folding! What's wrong with my machine?"
His eyes widen, he scratches his head and goes off to spend the rest of the afternoon on support.microsoft.com looking for a "folding window" bug.
Poor guy. System admin for a public comms company, straight out of community college, doesn't have a clue about my comp sci degree and my penchant for playing dumb (My ticket to management!).
I should really stop tormenting him, but GOD it's fun. You should have seen his face when I installed the MacOSX emulating ObjectDock. The guy just about died when I told him my PC had gone "all Maccy".
Yes, but will it do my laundry?
I think it could be fairly useful but would probably end up being more novelty than anything else. There are easier ways to accomplish the same thing that folding windows does. I will have to agree with a few other posters here, it is much easier to Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V.
Couldn't this be accomplished with just an x-mouse and whichever the windows' focused, bring it to front thing? weird.
for the java demo:
http://kafene.org/foldndrop.jar
That should give you an idea about the functionality. That's all I snagged before it got slashdotted.
Come on, there's got to be a lame gag about flipping, dropping, kicking, scrunching up windows and installing Linux in here somewhere.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Exposé actually shows the windows, not small previews. It organizes and resizes them on the screen temporarily so you can see all the windows and their content.
No existe.
Modal doesn't mean what you think it means.
With my current 3200x1200 dual flat panel setup, I hardly ever have overlapping windows... ever!
When was the last time anybody dragged and dropped anything, period? Copy and Paste is better. You don't have to "carry" the thing around.
Cheers :D
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
I honestly love exposé, sometimes you just lose track of a window and can't find it any more and I don't want to have to put everything in the dock and then open it up one by one. I'm still wondering what Leopard will have in store. I honestly can't wait.
- Qua
a few minutes ago...
Ctrl X/C
Ctrl (Shift) Tab
Ctrl V
For me, it's actually faster (but I'm also ambidextrous, so I am equally efficient with my left hand), plus you have more control over exactly what you want in windows. When you click and drag something, in windows it will move it if it's on the same partition, or copy it if it is across partitions. Using the control keys, you don't have to second guess what partition the folder you are dragging it to is on. KDE (IIRC) will ask by default when you click and drag, if you want to copy or paste (via a pop up menu). In windows, this is possible, too, but you must click and drag with the right button. Plus, in windows, if you have a bunch of software installed, you will have to scroll past a million items in the context menu before getting to copy/cut/paste options.
watched the video.
in the unfolding multiple windows, how do you see the title bar ?
where are u droping it ?
I agree with an earlier poster. ctrl-c/ctrl-x ctrl-p is easier.
Also, didn't read the article, (never do) but how do up paste instead of copy ? need to move your left hand off your dick and press a keboard key ? that defeats the whole purpose doesn't it ? You can ctrl-c/ctrl-x, ctrl-vwith one hand and continue stroking your dick with the other hand.
(is stroking ctrl-sssssss)
if
You are confusing copy/cut and paste with drag and drop, same as the other person who replied. Just because you can cut and paste some things with drag and drop, doesn't mean drag and drop is the same thing as cut and paste. What about dragging something onto a printer or application icon, for example?
Although this is pretty neat, I think far more useful would be a new form of "drag and drop" which just happens to be compatable with the the X middle mouse actions, but works for all objects: Select an object (in a program-specific way) to start a "drag", and click the middle mouse button to do a "drop". Normal interface is also supported where you push down on a selected object and then let go at the drop location. Pushing down the middle mouse button and holding it will result in exactly the same state as though you had dragged to that point, with the same cursor feedback, etc.
This has a whole lot of advantages: 1. You can drop on anything, including windows you have not created yet. As long as you can get to a window setup without selecting a draggable object (and thus starting a new drag) you can drop on it. 2. You can also drop the same source more than once, if that has a meaningful result. 3. It is obvious and intuitive how to abort a "drag and drop".
The website just folded and dropped. Could fold and drop be another name for slashdotted?
What does your Credit Report look like?
mirror anyone?
Coral cache
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
You're nuts, or you have a system that's well above average. I'm looking at my laptop screen (OS X) and there's 10 windows open in 3 applications. This is such a perfect way to drag and drop between them. Hell, I can see even peeling back a document to get a glimpse of the desktop or my browser. CMD-Tab is nice but it can be disorienting with 10 apps open and sometimes you just want to see a piece of another window. After watching the demo, I'm convinced this is a huge jump forward for small or medium sized screens/power users.
The Ion window manager for X is quite fast for keyboard only navagation. It tiles and tabs window. I've never used Expose so I can't say for certain if Ion is faster, but I usually have around 10 apps open and I have no problem getting to the one I want quickly with the keyboard.
This doesn't seem to do anything that letting the focus follow the mouse does. (Is that still the default behavior in KDE or Gnome?) I guess binding a key to switch between 'click to focus' and 'focus follows mouse' would do it without the eye candy.
I'm not fucking shitting you here. I typically have during my workday about 150 windows open at a time and constantly need to copy files around. And copy and paste between 20 to 30 open text files. Perfect solution for me. When will the windblows support this?
Learn to read.
You must be new here.
As a Windows user: Expose is much more useful than the taskbar, but neither solves the problem that the method in question tackles, unless Expose will let you keep whatever you're dragging around attached to the cursor. Will it?
...when I had a 9in screen on my Mac Classic?
Oh no! Pity we don't keeps copies!
But you have to pick and choose in a non-intuitive way.
Expose is easiest followed by Alt-Tab.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I can't believe I'm getting cool tech news via other sources before slashdot. This used to be THE place. What a pitty.
Yes, though I'm not sure how it works if you have expose set to use your mouse buttons, but for my usage, click and drag X, hit expose button, move to window, drop.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Yes, Expose interacts transparently with normal mouse operations.
Pickup a file / url / picture / selection,
hit a hotcorner to display all windows,
point at the desired target window,
wait for the window to be activated (2 seconds or so) and
drop carried object on to destination element.
Of course I never use hot corners or the hover to activate feature. I have expose actions mapped to the additional mouse buttons.
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Mirror
This looks cool and was rather fun to play with in the Java demo, but just how useful is it really?
How many people actually move/copy files in this manner anyway? I suppose Jo(e) Average may but surely anyone who uses a computer at all regularly would copy and paste - I've even seen people copy/cut and paste using menus more than I have seen them drag and drop between open windows.
Neat trick, but... next!
Oops, looks like MS got there first :)
Use a window manager that isn't completely moronic about focusing, and then you have two options.
1) If your "target" is fairly small, then bring it to front, but not obscuring your source. Then drag from source to target without bringing the source to front.
2) Select the thing you want to drag, and "pick it up" (start the drag operation) -- then use keyboard to bring the target window to top -- alt-tab, change desktops, whatever. Then complete the drag operation ("drop"). If you can't perform the necessary window operations with the keyboard, you're living in a world of hurt anyway.
I think you should try emacs for all your windowing goodness.
In stories like this you can see how much the Slashdot userbase has changed over the years.
Here's a new UI concept, that is very promising and hasn't been implemented anywhere yet. A true opportunity for Linux to score a "first" in UI design -- this could be the next generation of window shading/rollup, the possibilities are endless.
And the comments are "in Mac OSX you do such-and-such instead", "in Windows you do such-and-such instead". Things like "this problem is solved" -- as if there was One True Solution in UI design! -- and "before doing your research you should stop at the Apple store" -- as if PhD research didn't do related work assessment! --, enumerations of Windows key sequences, and so on. And those are ranked "5, Insightful".
A few years ago the comments would range from the usual "GUI? Give me a CLI any day" to discussions on how to implement this on Linux and which wm would get it first, which would (d?)evolve to a healthy wm flamefest.
The Slashdot audience truly has changed. *sigh*
The filesystem is the package manager
Such changes would include:
- The ability to fold windows without dragging an item. For example grabbing a corner and folding it.
- Spring loaded restore (bringing it back from a minimized state)of windows and folders
- Variable time for fold collapse. this means the time when the window decides you don't want to fold. I'd prefer it to stay folded longer so that people know they can interact with it; this would also help learn how to use it.
That's the short list. Not much to satisfy me; even though I'm a mac user diehard. I shunned windows for over 5 years because they have not innovated beyond 3.1 . I've used a mac for the last 3 delightful years and actually used their innovations to increase my work and product. Innovate or die.My sig is as boring as you...
This has got to be the stupidest GUI paradigm ever.
We should be moving to GUIs that used the computer to decide how to lay the windows out, even using case-base reasoning and neural networks to learn from our habits. That is to say, it should "decide" for use, intelligently.
Instead, this research team aims to imitate the exact mess of leafs of papers and books I have at my desk right now.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
This technology seems like the perfect killer app that would require Force Feedback. Imagine for a second... the more windows you leaf back, the heavier they become. You could blindly lift off a few windows...
jm2c
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
Umm.. I'm not entirely sure if you made it clear if you know about this or not, but expose can use the keyboard. You can use the arrow keys to select the window, and you can use the ` and tab keys to select the application (both in all-windows and app-windows mode)
Save your window config in a window register, open up another window, or another shell window, or whatever the fuck you want to do.
jebus, don't you see what vi has done to you?
what a wanking winer.
I use DnD with keyboard all the time. In Windows
(yes I use Windows at work) if you hold shift while
dragging then it moves, otherwise it copies.
And Alt-Tab works nicely with DnD though I don't
use that as much.
how can we teach those users who:
- do not even have the agility to perform double-click
- are dumb enough to resize the taskbar to over half-screen and live with it for entire year
- are so hysteric to scream at every single funny, innovative animation "OMG IT'S DISAPPEARING GOD HELP ME!!!!!"
More specifically one would have to compile in libstroke support for the mouse-gestures use metisse for the window-folding effects. After some configuration, one could do many of the very same (or at least nearly the same) things described in the article.
Anyone care to try? :)
Best regards, A.C.
This is a very interesting idea but after thinking a moment about the demo I realized that this applies to spatial window managers only. If you look at the major desktops, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Gnome, and KDE, all of them default to non-spatial file browsing. Could this technique reverse that trend?
Another obvious point, this technique will nicely compliment spring loaded folders in Mac OS X and KDE. (Spring loaded folders are folders that pop or spring open when the mouse is paused over the folder and dragging a document.) However, where as spring loaded folders are useful to both spatial and non-spatial window managers I don't see that being the case with with fold and drop windows unless the concept was implemented across applications.
-- The BlueCamel
Looks like the article was posted on a Fold-N-Drop server.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
You're right - sort of. It's not that the mouse or the keyboard are burdening you - it's when an application forces you to use *both* of them in combination that your efficiency really starts to suffer.
Some programs are primary mouse-driven (eg. 3D modeler). Others rely primarily on keyboard input (eg. word processor). I would argue that an interface strives to be most efficient when it maximizes the functionality of its primary input device.
For a 3D modeler, this means an intuitive 3D interface for rotations, use of all mouse buttons, and carefully positioned clickable buttons and toolbars.
For a text-editor/word-processor, this means loads of keyboard shortcuts. emacs/vi come to mind (MS Word falls short in my mind - I *need* ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k).
What become challenging for the developer (and, consequentially, the user) are applications that are sometimes mostly mouse-driven, sometimes mostly keyboard-driven. These apps necessarily force the user to switch between the mouse and keyboard frequently. Often, there is some gain to be had via keyboard shortcuts, but the interface does not always allow these to be most efficient.
A web browser, for example, or a file browser require both a mouse and keyboard (OK, so many of us get by just fine with the terminal, but let's ignore that). In the case of the web browser, many folks are drawn to opera and firefox specifically because of their extensive keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, allowing you to stick to whatever input device you were already using.
So, for example, in opera, i can gesture left if I'm using the mouse, or I can hit 'z' if I'm using the keyboard. It's *never* more efficient to reach for one or the other, but ultimately, I'll always need both (I didn't type in this post using cut and paste, and I certainly didn't click on the link to your post by tabbing through everything).
The *real* problem is that your window manager does not allow efficient navigation via the mouse. If, for example, you had mouse gestures, hot corners, or OS X expose functionality bound to extraneous buttons on your 5 button mouse, you would reach less often for the keyboard when you were already using the mouse.
You're right - reaching for the mouse just adds more time, but so does reaching for the keyboard. A window manager is best when it forces you to do neither.
Not that I post on slashdot or anything.
Sorry, I should've clicked the preview button..
"The folding has the advantage that you require no accuracy with the movement, just back and forth until you're at the right depth. With Expose you have to accurately land on the mini version of the window."
With the folding method the difference between two windows is just a few pixels. I found it really annoying to get it right with the trackpad on my laptop, and if you make a mistake, you can't get that window back again (that'd probably be fixed in a final version, but I can't imagine any way to do it elegantly besides starting over.)
With expose and a hot corner the target is infinitely high and wide, so I can slam my mouse in that direction without having to worry about missing, then I have a nice set of windows to choose from, without any overlapping, and of a large enough size that it doesn't take much more work to click the right one.
With folding I have to move my mouse a lot slower so I can make sure I get the right window, and instead of having every window displayed right in front of me, I only have the next one down. My desktop gets pretty messy, I don't know how far down or in what position on the screen the window I want is going to be.
You want to move text to a different application? Select it, and then drag it through Exposé to any window.
If you drag it to the desktop, it creates a file called whatever.textClipping. The file can be moved around or stored. It's a normal file. If you drag the file to an application, the full text of the file is pasted into your window. If you double-click the file, you can read it just like a normal file. I have three of these files on my desktop right now.
Want to add an image to your document? Drag it to the window. Want to add an attachment to an email? Drag it to the window. It's much simpler.
Albuquerque PC
This doesn't seem too intuitive. Can you imagine trying to explain this concept to your mother? Look at the Discarding Windows part of the video, where does the window go? Bring it back! It's like the drag-lock on the trackpads, inexperienced people hate it because it gets in their way, interrupting their work.
Does look pretty cool though.
...but it doesn't look very efficient from an HCI perspective. Maybe if they put a crease in the window after folding it would become more usable.
To tell the truth I have never used Exposé personally. I have only seen videos and images, but I do think it's a good idea. Actually I haven't really used a Mac in a while.
:P
From the latest features and updates, Macs look like developer paradise to me.
No existe.
Just watching the demo gives me carpal tunnel nightmares.
When was the last time anybody dragged and dropped anything, period? Copy and Paste is better.
I drag and drop on a regular basis. Copy and paste probably is better, but I find it more intuitive to use drag and drop. This is a personal preference of mine.
People will start making origami windows
If Practice Makes Perfect, And No One is Perfect, Why Practice?
I'd rather use the scroll wheel while holding down the left button and letting any window under the mouse pointer cycle through the top-most focus. I'm sure you could even work some transparency and fading effects into it to make it look as cool. Maybe even a reduced preview x-ray magnifier which widens to full screen on final selection (if you have decent 2d hardware)
Expose's biggest problem is that the reveal desktop (F11?) does not show and updated desktop unless you click it. Why did they do that?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Most of these comments are missing the point.
While there are many ways to drag a file by means of changing focus from the source to the destination window, there are times when you don't want to keep switching up focus.
I really like the way that, through using some simple gestures, I can move or copy files without being forced to change my window focus. The folding animation looks nice, but also serves the purpose of providing a more intuitive handling of open windows.
I hope to see this feature improved, along with user interface control involving gestures in general, because that is where the real innovations will come from.
Flailing Monkey
And for multiple files?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Are you kidding? Hold ctrl and click multiple files, or shift and select a range or array of files, then ctrl-c/x to copy or cut, . . .
everything in moderation
There was just something freaky with the whole mouse gestures thing beforehand. This just looks to be more of the same, although on a window manager level(Hey, XP is a window manager, ok? Well, you know what I mean anyways).
Better to limit hand gestures to when you're driving.
Works well enough for file management; but I will agree it isn't great.
But still, admit it, that's SO cool. I'll bet OS X does it first.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I think you're making a false distinction, unless you really think there's value and meaning in the "drag" portion of "drag & drop" other than the start and destination points/icons/windows. I can't see any value or info there myself.
If the printer or application has an icon, folder, or area-of-desktop-representing-it in any way, then you can select that thing somehow (tab, alt-tab, arrow keys, or some combo) before pasting (ctrl-V.)
everything in moderation
Why not just show them all on the screen at once, expose style? Much faster and easier.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Well, at least half of the comments I've read have given 'Fold n Drop' that kind of review: Who would use this if they can just use Control-C And Control-V?
Uh... Excuse me... but have you ever told an end user that you can copy and paste a file? I have... and they're often dumbfounded.
End users, and by that I mean the 'those who need all the help they can get' loser end users, will eat this up. Why? Because the first time they try to drag a file from one window to another, they'll see the window fold... and either freak out, or understand what it's for. No instructions. With 30 seconds of experimentation, they'll understand. It's intuitive. Remember when 'intuitive' was the goal of every GUI? Yeah, me too...
So, we have the windows users: "Drag to the taskbar, bring up the window you need!" Our 'loser' user doesn't know this one.
How about the Mac User: "Expose does this already! And Springloaded Folders too!" Yeah, it does... Springloaded folders are in the right direction, and so is Expose. But this is better and eaiser than Expose, and on par to Springloaded Folders.
Then you have your traditional Unix user: "Focus Follows Mouse! DUH!" Or even better yet: "Mouse?! Whatever happened to useing the keybaord? If you have to use a GUI, use Ratpoison or Ion!" These guys give me the giggles... First off, I'll say yes... keyboards are much more efficient. Give anybody an on screen keyboard to type an essay, and they'll agree. But focus following the mouse is more anoying than useful to most all of our 'loser' enduers. As for the mouseless window managers... You forget that the target audience doesn't like the keyboard for anything save typing. If more than one button needs to be pushed at the same time, the user will tend not to understand. The only major exception would be Ctrl-Alt-Del, which has Windows users on Macs very frustrated from time to time.
Then you have these guys: "What a waste of my CPU and GPU! Can't we get rid of the eyecandy?!" Quit your whining. Today, our 'loser' end user can purchase a system from Dell with 2.5 thousand times the processing power of the computer that the Apollo astronauts used to get to the moon, And our user will be doing things much less important. As for the GPU, I don't belive the Java script is 3D accellerated, and it seemed to run just fine... IN JAVA mind you... This in C++ or C would run much faster still. If a few wasted cycles make the system easier to use and understand, I'd call those cycles well used indeed.
So quit your moaning. Give this guy the credit which is due: It's a very facinating idea, and I hope to see it implemented in all the OS's as an option. From watching the Video, then trying the Java... I'm hoping to get it an option on all my computers, be them Windows, Mac or Linux.
-Pathway
And to drive the point home even further, Ctrl-Space to select rather than Ctrl-Click means no mouse at all... :)
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
This is something I for one welcome and have need for similar functionality every day. Now in windows I have to drag something to the taskbar (or whatever it is called), wait for the correct application to pop up and then continue the drag to the window. I think this is a highly innovative and I wonder why this hasn't been done before. And the way to do it seems very intuitive.
And to clarify, I am comfortable with ctrl+c/x/v, but they don't work for every application. If I have already selected something with a mouse, it is nice to be able to drag it to another window, which is overlapped by the window I am dragging from.
The problem is that I am always out of desktop space when I work and there are other things to drag and drop besides files between folders. (Also I use the mouse with my left hand, so ctrl+c/x/v actually makes me move my hand more back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard or move my right hand to the left hand side of the keyboard)
Gnome and Win XP implementations for me, please.
I'd love to drag-and-drop. Unfortunately, I use X11 and since the drag-and-drop fiasco of '99-'00 or so IIRC (KDE vs. GNOME, then eventually they both agree to use the same standard) everything has turned to shit and stagnated. Now I don't even bother and just use good old copy-and-paste that has worked since at least '96.
And where the hell is all that COM/OLE-like goodness that was promised in GNOME?? It seems the CORBA fad just fell off the face of earth. Last GNOME app I used barely did more than a standard X app.
I see that you work for Microsoft.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There is value in the dragging, at least for new computer users. It is much more intuitive to click on a file and drag it to another destination. This is a pretty good simulation of how we move things in real life and is easier to learn than some arcane keyboard commands. I'm a very experienced computer user and I prefer to just shift select some .ogg files and drag them to my Rio Karma (which is a pretty good player, btw, and much cheaper than the over-hyped iPOD)
All the time - I spend quite a lot of my work life moving bits of documents from one file to another. On the Mac, drag and drop means you don't have to go near the keyboard if you want.
Other times, I use only the keyboard. Both work for me.
(yes, on a Mac)
# Fold 'n' Drop Window Interaction (p2 of 2)
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Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20, @12:08AM (#13110590)
When you start browsing the web using ASCII only let us know.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? by Anonymous Coward
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Hey folks ... Linux you know the penguin thing.
... Standarda and Practices !
Any way if you in X, just highlight something, like a torrent url in da fox. Bring up xterm, type in "btdownloadcurses --url" put yer cursor on the end of tha CLI string and middle click.
Voila X-Copy.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
I use my trained, white circus mouse to move things about.
- Fetch me the paper.
- Main screen turn on.
- The average user isn't dexterous with a mouse. Some users can't even use a mouse. http://www.accessit.nda.ie/about_1.html#Dexterity_ considerations
- Unless the window is folded almost off screen to reveal titlebars, how can I reliably know which window I'm dropping onto?
- The java demo appears to use OS9/Nautilus style spatial navigation. If I want to put my file anywhere but the corner of the folder, I need to fold the overlapping windows so far it negates any increase in speed.
I do think ideas like this should be implemented in real code, in a real window environment, so we can actually see how well it works, and make improvements as required.... then again, I don't think computers will be easy enough for the average person until we drop the WIMP, desktop and applications; but that thinking is a bit too radical for slashdot!
I won't say that Microsoft's got the best solution for drag 'n dropping, however a few things come to mind:
This is somewhat true, however the Taskbar is usually pretty clear. Also pretty much any application which has an MDI/SDI (Multiple/Single Document Interface) has a taskbar button. It's up to the developer to implement this intelligently, not Microsoft
This can be a pain sometimes, but rarely for me
This has to do with the Windows dialog model and developers. When an application opens a child window there are many ways to do it. Based on the modality of the child, it can have it's own taskbar icon, it can be modal-less and therefor independant of the parent window's status, it can be application modal meaning that it's the single active window in the app, or it can be system modal meaning it's the topmost window system-wide. This is completely up to the developer, though I'd like to see more user control over windows available in Avalon.
Same as the previous point.
That said, while I haven't used a Mac in a long time, I have seen Expose in use and it appears to be pretty useful. Though it would be another instance of Microsoft "innovation", I'd like to see a similar window management feature available in Windows. Call it copycatting or whatever you like, but giving your users a nice feature put out by somebody else first isn't really a bad thing.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Works in the sample Java applet, but not (yet) in OriModo. The Java applet has better "sensitivity" too, easier to fold one window, and to leaf through many.
Now someone just needs a way to apply this to all my Firefox tabs...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/expose.html link to what everyone seems to be rabbiting on about.
That's awesome! So I can use it to make free phone calls?
I've got Expose mapped to my mouse's scroll wheel-click, and it's trivially easy for me to invoke it in the middle of a drag operation.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I'm all for the improvement and innovation of interface design. Making a design intuitive increases productivity, even among power users who may do a particular action only once among a few thousand, and may not have it as ingrained as expected. That said, there are some major drawbacks to this design that may serve to make it less productive and even less intuitive.
Counter-Intuitive Metaphors
Metaphorical abstractions for computer objects only work if they have a clear representation of being similar to object they represent. While some windows (text boxes, for example) have a clear similarity to being a leaf of paper, many others do not; directory windows seem fairly unrelated to 2d objects: they contain multiple objects inside of them, likening them more to being a box or drawer, some 3d abstraction. Thus it is not only counter-intuitive to "fold-over" an object which has depth, but also brutally forcing a metaphor onto an object of which could suggest a completely alien mental abstraction from the one a user original envisioned. For this reason, almost all interface references to real-world objects are either extremely obvious or very broad in definition. The "focus" metaphor works, for instance, because you can bring any object (one with depth or no depth) and put it on top of another object, thus bringing it into "focus" or plain-sight; it is an extremely simple and all-encompassing concept.
Temporality and Spacial Complexity
The second problem with this method is its inherent temporality. Most GUI operation requires no timing, and in the rare cases that timing is required (ie: double-clicking, hovering over spring loaded folder), the operation is extremely simple and requires no precision. The one exception is double-clicking, and you can witness its result by watching any surface user fail to open a folder because they can't keep the mouse still while clicking the left mouse button. The folding operation illustrated here, on the other hand, is an extremely complex operation that takes some very precise timing. Even I, an experienced computer user (as we all are), had to practice it many times to double-back on my mouse movement fast enough to correctly "fold-over" a window. Since windows move and change in organization, the operation is slightly different each time it is performed. I can already tell that even if it the operation becomes somewhat natural, I'll always continue to miss on occasion because of it's complexity. And if I'm having trouble with it, I can't imagine what it would be like for my parents!
UPDATE: I had my mother test it out to see if a surface user could cope with it, and after struggling with it for a few minutes, finaly gave up.
Accidents and Set-backs
The third problem I for-see is that folding can easily occur unintentionally and is difficult to undo. Spring loaded folders and "snap-to" focusing work well because their actions inherently require a very specific action: going over a folder and waiting for about a half a second for the window to pop up. Since the cursor is going to be generally moving while dragging objects, a half-second wait over a folder or partly obscured window is abnormal and requires intentionality. Even then, it is as easily (if not more easily) reversed as it done by simply moving off the newly focused window. With folding, on the other hand, it's easy to see how any quick movement during a drag could activate the effect, and when the process of folding is started, it takes an even more complex spacial action to set it back, that being the looping around and back onto the fold from the other side.
Just a few thoughts on intuitive interface design, using this as an example of what works and what doesn't.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Eat & Run
The first post still wants to use his keyboard.
../ Of course the latter is faster if that's all you're doing.
Personally, I wish the computer cognoscenti *would* give more emphasis to truly graphical computing.
The fact that the keyboard is more efficient for interacting with the majority of computer operations that people do really just goes to show that our culture hasn't advanced from thinking in pipelineable data chunks to true objects.
For much software, config files, switches, and option params still dominate over graphical dialogs, and even those that do exist in polished software are still just checkbox and radio equivalents of config settings, not real objects in the sense of "chopsticks interacting with noodles" (associating entities with containers).
Even most GUIs are simply visual equivalents of the same verb-noun operations that CLIs have always used, eg, graphically foo.txt dragging up a level is the same as mv foo.txt
I think the future is somewhere in the way non-linear video editing suites and graphical art programs work, but more consistent.
Hopefully now that OSes are moving to 3rd gen windowing architectures that allow much more complex visual depictions (OS X a few years ago, Longhorn next year, Linux real soon), more experiments like this will be tried, and new interactions will emerge.
Although this post has made no sense, here's to truly graphical computing!
While the demo looks slick and intuitive, and I would try it in a heartbeat ... Oh wait it IS java...
In KDE, lmouse select and hold some item.
using L hand (assuming right handed, lefties may remap kbd at will) all one has to do to cycle thry windows is alt+tab--- I ASSUME Win is the same way, likely Mac and every othe window manager GUI made in the last 10 years...
IIRC there is another key combo that cycles through windows... How is the articles parent really any better?
The only sigificant advantage is the on-screen windows are not reordered, assuming one has the layer memorized or such. I personally doubt that would be any use for most folks.
I Do miss ONE thing on my Amiga--it wasn't original... was a little util that allowed one to do window operations (or whatever) by chording mouse buttons. (The Amiga supported 3, and the std mouse had a place for and witing for the switch)
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Yes, ten Word icons followed by "C:\Docu..." is a REALLY great way to drag stuff from window to window within an application (or multiple apps)!
The problem with the Task Bar is that it relies upon the window title, which is overloaded with the application and document name typically, and provides no clue as to the actual content of that window. Expose provides a visual thumbnail approach for finding the "right" window, and allows for "tooltip"-like document names to pop up if you hover the mouse.
Being faster is one thing, being user-friendly is another. What makes applications friendly are visual clues. If you never have to guess how things work but they just work, that makes an environment friendly to work with. If you move the mouse cursor over something and it changes shape, you just *know* you can click there. When you drag something over the border of a window and it briefly curls up, you just *know* that you can fold the window. I think that's a whole lot more intuitive than holding it over the (often auto-hiding) footer bar until the desired window pops up. I also expect newbie users to 'get' this with a lot less effort than figuring out that they have to press ctrl-C/ctrl-V (which, whithout doubt, stands for Copy/Vaste). Now personally I'm also a keyboard person, so probably I wouldn't use this all that much. However this technique doesn't interfere with the existing copy/paste, it just gives an extra alternative to make life easier, which is a Good Thing. This actually is progress. By the way, isn't an 11 megabyte AVI to demo something that a 54 kilobyte .jar does better a bit over the top?
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In my experience, that plug in always dragged my computer (2.2 GHz P4) to its knees, so I turned it off. The problem being, of course, that for Alt-Tab to draw that reduced window thumbnail, it has to tell the app to redraw itself completely in a memory buffer, then resize that to the proper size, etc. With OS X's window manager, all that is done by the video card, and the app doesn't redraw anything since it's already double-buffered.
In any case, that gets a little closer to Expose functionality, except that a large window will get shown indecipherably tiny while a small window will get shown nice and big (no common scale), you get no spatial recognition as the thumbnail is always center-screen, and only one window is visible at once.
The contrast between this alt-tab approach and the article's approach is precisely the spatial recognition. While you "fold" front windows out of the way, you see what's directly behind them in the stack, as you would in a desk of overlapping papers. Spatial memory is incredibly important for usability.
Huh? Not sure what you're talking about here. F11 reveals my desktop, completely up to date.
what are these "additional mouse buttons" you speak of. My puck mouse has but one!
In windows (XP at least), you drag your object to the taskbar. Whichever task you're hovering over will be brought to the foreground. Then drag to that window and drop.
You can use expose to show all windows of the current application as well, so if you want to see all your terminals, or all of your photoshop windows. By default: F9: All windows shown F10: All windows of current application shown F11: Desktop shown
Anything more complex than pointing and clicking is beyond X and the cluster-fuck of toolkits. Even getting that far sometimes requires herculian effort.
additional mouse buttons? i dont follow...
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
You know, I don't really care too much about that feature, but that's probably because I'm too influenced already by my platform of choice.
But I'd like to see someone try to implement it in Gnome or KDE because it would finally mean someone would attempt to try something new instead of copying Windows and Mac (while all the time shouting they suck).
It would be interesting to see what happens when this and similar attempts at original GUI usability evolution catch on.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
That would for instance be mouse button 4 or 5.
I'd say Expose, followed by just hovering over the target window on the taskbar (whilst still dragging the file) until it becomes the active window.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
If you install the windows XP powertoy, which improves the alt-tab switching you get a preview of each window before selecting it!
.
Ok, without wishing to start an OS flame war, I have to point out that XP can do all of that, in almost exactly the same manner.
"You want to move text to a different application?"
Under XP simply select it and drag it to the other application.
"If you drag it to the desktop, it creates a file called whatever.textClipping."
Under XP this works too, you get a file called 'appname1.scp' this too can then be dragged back into applications.
"Want to add an image to your document?"
XP can also let you drag drop an image into a document. However, some apps embed it as an OLE item (Office apps mainly) - but many insert it as a viewable iamge.
If you find an App that doesn't support this under XP then it's the Apps fault, not the OS's - Most programmers are lazy and can't be bothered to add the required hooks.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Shame you need to drag an object to activate the functionality - suppose you are just riffling through a set of pages
Here is an easier way to drag & drop to the correct window. To test:
1) Open two explorer file manager windows.
2) Hide one of them behind the other, or some other window, OR EVEN MINIMIZE IT!
3) Drag a file to the other window's taskbar button.
4) Wait a second, and the other window pops up!
5) Release said file and voila!
This doesn't look as neat, but it doesn't affect existing windows and it works on minimized windows too.
For the neat-effect this should be implemented IMHO. It's always good to have more intuitive ways doing stuff on the desktop metaphor.
I'm glad the author doesn't seem to have it patented. With the current patent-hungry climate of today, real innovation will be stopped and controlled rather quickly.
"Under XP this works too, you get a file called 'appname1.scp' this too can then be dragged back into applications"
I am using XP and sitting here dragging your post onto the desktop, all I get is a circle with a line through it.
it'd be nice if windows didnt absolutely unhackabbly insist that the window that has focus is on top. on my good ole amiga you could chose how to dish focus out and bring windows to the front. i set it so you had to click on the title bar specifically to bring it to the front. simple and when shovelling files about i could drop them into a text editor/ photoshop/browser etc without the application's resulting focus making the folder window dissapear behind it, forcing me to fish it out again or resize everything so that they sit next to each other. far too simple, i know. (IIRC you can do this in KDE too)
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Under XP this works too, you get a file called 'appname1.scp' this too can then be dragged back into applications. this is brilliant. i never knew i could do this. thank you. now, who do i talk to to get firefox to support this?
Being user friendly is great for things you're only likely to do once, but if its something you'll do houndreds of times a day, even saving 10% of the time adds up easily, Which is why I use vim. "zc" to close a fold may not make much sense to someone that doesnt already know it, but once you map that in your mind you save a lot of time.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
"You cannot drop an item onto a button on the taskbar. However, if you drag the item over a button without releasing the mouse button, the window will open after a moment, allowing you to drop the item inside the window."
Took me about 5 minutes between sitting in front of Windows (95, mind you) for the first time and getting this message. If it happens so often that you feel the need to design a message box around this user behaviour, well gee maybe users really do want to be able to drop items onto taskbar buttons and you should just let them? Morons.
(Yes, I'm aware that you said hovering until it becomes the active window. It's still a stupid interface design.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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...and only one window is visible at once.
That's the crucial difference between Alt-Tab and Expose. It really doesn't matter if Alt-Tab has window thumbnails or read out audio descriptions recorded by Bill Gates himself - in most cases the window name displayed by standard Alt-Tab is sufficient to determine what window it is, anyway. And none of it changes the fact that you need to Tab-Tab linearly through the windows until you find the one you want. You can't even click in the Alt-Tab list... Or use cursor keys, or the mouse wheel. (Does the Powertoy enable any such functionality?)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
hmm, it would seem that IE doesn't support it - All the office apps do however. -Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
I get the same thing, trying it in Firefox and then IE but zip zap nothing. Regardless Windows is a crock of shit. Theres been no real UI innovation since 95. Sure theres the quick launch bar and a chunkier start menu but has my ability to manage and organise windows changed? no!
Yes, ten Word icons followed by "C:\Docu..." is a REALLY great way to drag stuff from window to window within an application (or multiple apps)! Try hovering the mouse over the Taskbar buttons - it should display a tooltip with the full title. I've heard that XP can also group app windows into a single taskbar button per app, though as I'm still on 98SE...
It depends on whether the application supports it. Few do. Opera doesn't - you can even drag-and-drop text selections within the app. OpenOffice Writer doesn't support it, you get the "forbidden target" cursor you describe. Firefox is the same. MS Word assumedly does it, I don't have it installed anymore (despite this lack of a crucial feature on OOOs side). Finally WordPad (aka write.exe), available with pretty much every Windows install since 95, does support it.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
For much software, config files, switches, and option params still dominate over graphical dialogs, and even those that do exist in polished software are still just checkbox and radio equivalents of config settings, not real objects in the sense of "chopsticks interacting with noodles" (associating entities with containers).
The problem I have with GUI for config settings is that you usually have to click all over the damn place to even see what the config options are. Even if you are very familiar with the interface, you may have to click numerous times in numerous places, just to change a couple of settings.
If I am looking at a text file, I can see all of the settings in -one place-! If I am not familiar with what options I have, I don't have to click through -every- element (tabs, buttons, menus) of a GUI to get an idea of what's possible. And if I am familiar with the options, I don't waste a bunch of time clicking around (hello MS Exchange!) to get things done, I use the search function of a text editor (/ in vi) to get where I need to be, quickly.
IMO, this is one of the biggest reasons why GUI-based administration mostly sucks.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
When you click and drag something, in windows it will move it if it's on the same partition, or copy it if it is across partitions.
.exes - has a little arror)
IIRC, dragging files with the *right* mouse button results in a little menu popping up when you drop them, giving you the choice of what to do. Holding down Ctrl, Shift or Ctrl-Shift also controls the effect.
Copying shows a "plus" sign in the corner of the icon, moving files does not. That's how you tell. (Creating a shortcut - when dropping
More info at http://www.idxt.biz/blog.htm - Not useful info, but info nonetheless.
All the time. Click and drag, then hold down the mouse button while I use Alt-Tab to switch to the right screen.
This does look like a nice idea though - it sounds a tad fiddly, but I'd be willing to give it a go.
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The parent post is a great illustration of how this sort of feature can complement Expose. The advantage of a "folding" metaphor is that it allows the user to take advantage of their spacial memory to help them find windows. Expose breaks this and is only useful if the windows are very visually distinct. Alternatively, window cycling (Windows: Alt-tab Mac: Apple-~) retains window x,y positions but rearranges the stacking order of windows as they cycle through making it hard for users to remember the stacking order of their windows. WIth a folding (or other similar) system the user can dig down straight to the location (x,y and window stack depth) where they left a window. Of course expose and keyboard shortcuts are excellent complementary features to this.
What rant was I asked to meta-moderate??
0 54263&threshold=-1&mode=nested&commentsort=0
./'d I'll have a look. Until then I can only comment on the flying windows Microsoft is touting, the GL windows that shimmy and shake like Jerry Lee Lewis, and the OSX windows that minimize with the user's choice of three animations -- Genie, Scale, and Suck (if you know how to invoke the Suck then you've done more than most people, congrats).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155696&cid=13
As a Designer -- not just a chooser of pretty colors and fonts or "making things look professional" I take heart with this comment. I think there is a place for custom widgets and the poster gets it a bit wrong.
Like wind minimizing, or UI interactions, too much is too much. Once the gentleman's demo site is no longer
Out of these methods of UI interaction, perhaps the OSX implementation is the simplest, clearest feedback loop one could hope for. It builds slightly what was popularized in Windows95, what began, oh where? NeXt?
Anyway, the newer UI window interactions that make me feel like putting my favorite playlist of Prince on are spurious and un-necessary.
Back in the late 80's a friend of mine and I wrote a window manager with a much simpler solution to this. We simply added a 'send to back' button to every window. A single click and that window is sent to the bottom of the pile. Very easy for going behind your windows and seeing what is back there...
Thanks. I thought it was kind of neat. At first I didn't think it was intuitive at all, but after flipping corners for 2-3 minutes it had become second nature. I like it. Did they have source up too?
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
AFAICR, 10.3.x only updated the desktop and finder windows when the user clicked in them. 10.4.x has automatic updating.
I was just bitching about this the other day. Now, as a Win32 programmer, I know why it does that. But I don't care. It's dumb and it's user-antagonizing, and it's a classic, perfect example of shitty UI design.
Enlighten me: why does it do that? I can see the difficulty of doing it without application support, but why not offer applications a way of registering an event handler for a taskbar drag and drop event? (Sorry for using what might not be proper vocabulary.) Or you could pretend that dropping it on a taskbar button is the same as dropping it on the window's title bar.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
It DOES save you time. That demo absolutely rocks. I've been in situations where I've had a ton of windows overlapping each other and I want to move an object to something that's on the bottom layer. So, now we have a choice between clicking a bunch of times to minimize the first few windows, resizing another one and then finally moving the object into the correct position dropping it, then restoring the other windows back to their original position. OR click on the object and fold a few windows back (which is totally cool by the way) and dropping it. Much better! THIS should be a standard feature in feature window managers.
Exposé is fabulous, and very slick to work with. When you get right down to it, though, its a workaround. Unlike Windows / KDE / GNOME / etc., open windows have no representation on the app bar, so if you can't see them, you can't get to them at all. Hence, exposé.
If you're doing 3-D design work or lots of other types of work, the mouse is already in your hand. In particular, if you're trying to do DRAG AND DROP, which is when this capability is useful, then the mouse is almost certainly already in your hand. Learn to think.
In fact, Expose not only 'expose' the opened windows altogether, it allows you to drag and drop things among the windows (as well as between the window and the desktop). The things you can do drag and drop are not limited to files, e.g. I have tried drag 'n drop images directly from a webpage to iTune Artwork using epose.
I guess the function the original post mentioned are already achievable through Expose, if not better.
My understanding is that the objective is to move a file from one folder to another, not to drag and drop. That is a means to do it. Cut and paste is another. Why drag to a printer (I've never even heard of this one) when I can hit ctl-p? Lets not get so obsessed with drag and drop that we lose sight of why its there, the objective. Besides, its just a metaphor, you're really dragging anything.
Really new users find drag an drop about as intuitive (or less) as mv dir1/file1.txt dir2
Which to use depends on the person using the computer. Options are good.
Personally, I'll take keyboard use, its an order of magnitude faster, *for me*. I can do a keyboard shortcut in less time than it takes to remove my hands from thekeyboard to grab the mouse, let alone move and manipulate the mouse. If I'm just lounging out, keyboard out of reach, surfing the web, then I'll use the mouse because its more convienent.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Your mother (and mine, by the way) isn't alone. There's a zillion people out there who can't figure this out. I know a Harvard professor who double-clicks on everything. I know a high-tech Marketing professional who spastically double-clicks on stuff, then double-clicks again when the app is slow, just in case it missed her first double-click.
It's hard to explain. "Double-click invokes programs." Invokes? What the hell does that mean to the average person?
Paradoxically, single-click on a link causes a new web page to be displayed. That sure looks like something got "invoked", doesn't it?
How about all those apps that do something unexpected when you select an entry out of a combo box? Isn't the metaphor supposed to be SELECT, followed by PUSH A BUTTON?
So it's not all that easy to explain when you're supposed to single-click and when you're supposed to double-click. And, the fact that Windows misses some of the double-clicks you do because of the stupid-ass way double-click is implemented at the message level doesn't help, either.
Oh, and let's not forget the fact that Windows drops internal messages occasionally anyway (about 1 in 100,000 the last time I measured it, in case anyone cares), so remember that the next time you decide to create your own message class and "trust" Windows to deliver your messages.
It's funny how you can always tell the OS a person uses by their mouse-prefs.
Linux: the mouse is only good for click, drag, and select/copy. Users believe the mouse is a useless add-on. On Linux, I agree.
Windows: good for getting those right-click menus. Also the only way to do things that don't have obvious keyboard shortcuts - preference dialogs, toolbar buttons, etc.
Mac: Drag and drop everywhere. Bind the middle button to Expose. Eventually you just keep your hands in the Quake position: left hand on the kb, right on the mouse. You know, a GUI.
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Yes, ten Word icons followed by "C:\Docu..." is a REALLY great way to drag stuff from window to window within an application (or multiple apps)!
Funny, when I read that, I glanced down at my task bar. I'm using Gnome, and all my apps in the task bar only display the title of the document open in them. Firefox just says "fold n drop...", Rhythmbox just says gives the song name playing, and abiword only has the document title. None of them have app names or file paths. Same thing when I hit Alt+Tab.
I can honestly say that I had never consciously noticed this before. But it does make things nice and simple.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Ok, without wishing to start an OS flame war, I have to point out that XP can do all of that, in almost exactly the same manner.
XP doesn't support any of these features. XP leaves drag and drop support to the applications. Office chooses to implement many of the features but few other applications do.
Cool solution to dealing with overlapping windows, but why deal with them at all?
I've always thought that overlapping windows caused more trouble than problems they solve. It looked advanced back in the day, and was great with small screens, and sometimes you still want to use it, but I'd find it more useful for typical use if windows diddn't overlap unless you forced them to (by continuing to drag for instance).
Or, coming from the other direction, some wish-list ideas I had while using ion are the ability to detach windows into temporary floating windows, resize neigboring frames by dragging one frame's titlebar, and somehow making it easier to use things like the Gnome panel in ion.
I recommend trying ion and similar window managers like LarsWM and Ratpoison and WMI.
Unfortunately to make window managers truly helpful, they will need to have more information about what its windows *mean* than is currently available from X11. For example, it's error prone trying to deduce whether Window X and Window Y are considered part of the same application by the user. Gnome and KDE do a pretty good job of it (e.g. grouping windows by application in the window list/task bar) but it's not perfect. And this is just the most basic information. Other useful info which could modify window behavior is how often a window is used or updated, when it was run, by what means was it launched (menu, button, terminal?), various categorizations and semantic tagging attached to the application permanently or to the window temporarily, etc.
A great advantage of an X11 system is the flexibility to experiment with the window manager, I hope to see more cool stuff in the future, especially from Gnome, KDE, and the distributions' choices.
However, wordpad does stink at simply highlighting something. It always tries to intelligently guess at what you are trying to highlight and ends up taking a few extra characters when copying and pasting anything but word characters [HTML text for example]. Very annoying.
Maybe someone can indicate on how to turn that 'feature' off.
I agree with you (despite the allegations that cut&paste is different from drag&drop), for right hand mouse usage only. Being ambidextrous and currently using the mouse with my left hand due to tendonitis in the right it becomes very hard to reach that Ctrl X,C,V (especially on an ergonomic keyboard) with my right hand. So all the die hard lefties out there are SOL with this combination.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
Nah.. this is a mac.
'additional mouse buttons' is button 2.
Apparently it has something to do with copying and pasting. I didn't know you could do that just using the keyboard! Control+C to copy, and Control+V to paste. It's hard to hit the plus key exactly at the right time though, I think they should work on that to make it easier for computer newbies like me.
Is that what dragondrop is, copying and pasting with the keyboard? But why would I want to look at the back of the windows?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Unless you are already using the mouse to select arbitrary files and folders to move between windows.
In XP (and every windows since 3.1) that's called 'tile'. In practice it's the worst possible way to view windows once you have more than about 4 of them.
I played with expose but hated it.. alt tab is so much easier. OTOH on osx I try to keep as few applications open as I can as my mini hasn't got a lot of memory and OSX has a habit of leaving things running without telling you (there's a little black mark on the taskbar that's the only thing that tells you the app is still running and chewing memory.. that's easy to miss.. I'd love it if you could tell it to always shut down the app when you close it but osx seems to prefer that to be a separate operation).
FAPS.
Half-Life, Doom, Quake, Unreal, Halo, Battlefield, etc. Do you get the picture? :P
I've been playing around with this Fold'n'Drop this morning and It was neat, until I started to use excel, it thinks I'm dragging an Icon when I'm selecting rows in excel so the spread sheet starts to fold on me! Very annoying!
On the other hand, Windows has had a properly functioning maximize button for atleast 14 years now.
But in windows, can you restore the windows back to their original location? And, can you tile all application Windows? I honestly don't know the answer to these, but this is eactly what expose does. For me, expose works great
I'm sorry, but this is just plain stupid. In the example screenshots, he could have easily enough just dragged it to the left side instead of the right, and wouldn't have to wiggle his mouse around. If you are trying to make it behave like real world objects, why choose paper? How often do I take things and move them between different papers? Never. You write on papers and you read them. I prefer to have my windows of objects (such as files and folders) behave like baskets. If I have a stack of baskets, and I want to move something from the top basket to the bottom basket, I pull out the bottom basket, put it side by side to the top basket, and move things across. What do you know, thats the same way Windows works.
Sure, this guy came up with a new concept, but totally useless for the intended purpose. I think its funny that his credentials are "studying UI design". Sorry bud, but studying it, and producing good UI are two different things.
As a Windows and Mac user, I don't miss Expose on Windows XP because the taskbar is so much better. All that I see Expose as is a cool looking trick to make up for the fact that the Dock sucks.
This looks like it could be very neat, though I usually just use the folder tree view at the side when I want lots of folders open at the same time.
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
When I use drag'n'drop, I sometimes use the keyboard to move windows out of the way while I still have my "payload" dragging. Of course, I stay away from the mouse most of the time, and I don't use drag'n'drop much any more. Copying/moving files/text around is done solely on my keyboard, not the mouse. When you can't see the target window, drag'n'drop IS about switching between windows. If it wasn't, why would this technique be useful? :)
Did you just compare Expose to dragging things to the task bar???
Lame...
Why? It works and has worked for a long time.
If you just click the red close button in the window, you just close the window; you don't exit the application. To quit you either have to Command-Q or select Quit/Exit from the menu. There is a stronger sense of distinction between an application and its document windows in OSX than in Windows.
The only MacOS application I've ever seen to quit the app when you close the window is Windows Media Player that came with Office X (which, incidentally, I find annoying - at least WMP loads fast on OSX).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I just sold my Powerbook, the first Mac I've owned in 15 years because I couldn't stand how mouse-centric it was. When I'm working, I reach for the mouse only when absolutely necessary, but what made OSX' app-switching more annoying was the fact that you used one key combo to switch between apps, and another to switch between app windows. I tried using Witch for a while, but it was too slow to be usable. Using the keyboard AND the mouse (Expose'=f9+click) was just too much work. Good for you that it works for you. I thought the interface was very nice, but too difficult to use for someone who was keyboard-centric. In fact, I use Fly-a-kite on my Windows box to implement the good parts of the interface, but with a better user experience (for me).
:)
I tell ya, the one thing that drove me absolutely insane was the Home & End keys. On every other OS, they take you to the beginning and end of the line, but on OSX, they take you to the beginning and end of a document. Shortcut keys should be used to speed common tasks. I'm much more likely to jump around WITHIN a document, than to the beginning and end. And, don't even get me started on jumping between words!
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
There is a KDE program called Kompose which offers similar functionality on a KDE desktop.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
I for one blame the ossified porn industry for not making it easy to legally purchase content online forcing us to resort to P2P.
Photos.
People interested in this sort of stuff might also take a look at some research that I have been doing over the past few years looking more specifically at window management for multiple monitor users. You can find the studies I have conducted and techniques I have proposed (and built) on my research website
I'm also currently looking for Windows XP multiple-monitor users to run some new window management interfaces for some studies that I am conducting. Details are linked off of my main site.
Just to counter some of the "this doesn't solve a real problem" comments... this is research and sometimes the value of these things is the way it gets other people to think about the right interaction that windows can have, whether cross-application or within-application (such as in a programming environment). No matter how much screen space you have you will always be constrained... figuring out ways to get the most of the space are likely to be worthwhile. Anyway, I do understand the "is this a problem?" comments... I conducted some studies to try to figure out the real problems and then attack them directly. Again, see the webpage for details and email me if you have questions or are interested in being a study participant.
It would also need to be overhyped far in advance in a way that undercut its effectiveness, and it would need to be fabulously expensive, and it would have to play largely to the insecurities of the people who deployed it rather than the people it was theoretically aimed against. ("Shock and Awe" really applied better to the effects of 9/11 on the US population, didn't it?)
Sounds like you're wanting a patent on vaporware that's largely an irrational threat to the OS market. MS surely has prior art.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
So, I can fold and look under something?
Great, now my windowing system can look just like my RW desktop, with piles of crap I can't find stuff under.
Wasn't there something about computers making life *easier*?
mark "art doesn't need to imitate life
*that* closely"
Its curious that no one has mentioned you can drag an object to the toolbar over the object you want and it is opened and brought to the top. You can then drag up to the window and let it go.
This could be a really nice feature on Gnome to improve the not-so-well understood spacial navegation metaphor. At least to me both things look like a perfect fit.
I think the original idea was that you could drop the file onto different bits of the window, but I'd still rather just drop the file onto the taskbar and have it do the most logical activity.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Sheesh, excuuuuuse me for stating the site was slashdotted, and trying to do it in a humorous fashion.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This is not a solution for inherent problems in the drag-n-drop system. It's a cool idea for an alternative method of drag-n-dropping. Stop being slashdotters and accept it for what it is.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
This is exactly what the taskbar allows you to do. Try this on a windows box... open a few windows, grab a file from the top window, while hoilding it, drag to taskbar, you will see one, or many buttons for open explroer windows, depending on if you have them set to group. If it is set to group, then hover over the group for a second, and it will expand and show you all the windows open, while still hoolding the mouse, drag to the name of the window you want to move to (or of not grouped, just hover over the button for the window). That window will pop to the front, at which time ou can drag to it and release. The whol procedure takes about 2 seconds and work quite well.... You can use this to drag files into open applications as well.. I use it all the time to drag files into a running copy of photoshop
I reject your reality
If something like this were to be implemented in X, would it more correctly be done in the Window Manager or in the Compositing Engine (like shadows and transparency)?
Just curious...
All GUIs (Windows, KDE/Gnome, Mac etc) have some sort of taskbar with the open windows in iconic form. If I want to drop something in a window, why not drop it there, instead of doing crazy mouse moves to reveal the windows underneath? And windows could be raised at front while the mouse icon passes over the relevant icon of the task bar, in order to reveal the contents of the window (in case there are multiple windows open).
Sure. On none of these games do you actually have to type with both hands. So I'd say they are primarily mouse driven.
If, in these games, you actually had to use both hands on the keyboard (aka. getting fragged while chatting with your teammates), then you'd probably start complaining about reaching for the mouse, and finding it only a split second after chunks of your now dismembered player decorate all of the surrounding walls :-)
(OK, so the first time I beat doom I was just using the keyboard, but that's because I didn't have to worry about aiming up the vertical axis.)
Actually, an interesting game comes to mind: Darwinia actually uses mouse gestures to spawn new creatures within the game. Right click, draw the creature you'd like to create, and it pops up. I'm not sure this is the most efficient - but it was neat.
Not that I post on slashdot or anything.
View > Options > Options tab > Toggle off "Automatic word selection"
"Smart" highlighting annoys me too.
The concept is nice. The problem, for me at least, is that when I want to drop something into a new location, I need to make sure that that location is where I want the file to be. To do that I need to see the titlebar of the window. If all the windows are stacked on top of eachother, it's a pain in the butt to "fold" far enough all the windows covering the target so I can see the titlebar of the target window. Of course, I could move the windows so they're not directly stacked...but that would defeat the need of folding the windows.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Umm.. except it doesn't do that. The Titlebar only shows the name of the document, not the path.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Actually, there's that button on the (some)keyboard for context menus that simulate a right click. because of this I hardly use a mouse in Windows anymore
Macs have lots of useful keyboard shortcuts. Mice are only useful if you're not doing things that require typing.
As a 3D modeler myself, I just want to point out that you are wrong.
"Carefully positioned toolbars and buttons" do nothing but slow people down.
Good contextual menus help, but the real efficiency comes from when you know how to use the keyboard.
Most 3D (and higher end 2D) apps these days have very customizable keyboard layouts, and even offer things like context switching or pie menus while holding keys as well as commands when pressing them. Why bother with looking for toolbars when you can have your view keys set to the F1 and/or 123 row, your movement keys set to the QWE row, your creation keys set to the ASD row, and editing keys set to the ZXC row? Along with modifiers (Shift, Ctrl, Alt) and three mouse buttons, you should never have to use toolbars or menus, and ideally you should never have to leave Quake-style position, except to occasionally name objects/layers or type in numerical values).
I'm always very disappointed when I see someone using a graphics program and constantly turning their head to look for a toolbar icon, moving their cursor to the left and back to the workspace to do something, and then again to switch back, because I KNOW that they could be working several times as fast and enjoying the process more if they learned to use the keyboard along with the mouse.
Fair enough. I admit, I'm not too familiar with these programs (or at least not the expensive ones :) Still, as I said in reply to another's post, you don't have to type with both hands on the keyboard. So a 3D modeler remains, as I view it, a primarily mouse-driven interface.
So I mischaracterized the interface in 3D modelers, but that shouldn't affect my point, since they are still mouse-driven.
Not that I post on slashdot or anything.
I'll take you up on that. More likely an opensource window manager will do it first, then OSX, then windows; but in windows only through a third party shareware program that requires insane amounts of CPU/Memory.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Most of these issues don't appear in demo. The windows all fold back easily, and they interact like paper does so it's not all that confusing.
The issue you don't see in the demo is the one you have with a paper clutter. You have to start folding to begin with. The reason people love colapasable tree views is so they can see the details of their organized work that they are intersted in. No such organization exists for a pile of paper or windows confined to a dinky single interface GUI. The major problem is that most of your windows are covered by the one you see so you don't know which one to fold to start. Your chances of needing to move something from the one you see to the 10 you can't see are about 10:1.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Actually 3d modeling programs are often most effecient when you use the mouse and keyboard at the same time. The majority of the work is done with the mouse, but switching through the majority of tools is much easier with the keyboard. For example, if you bind the most used tools to easy to access hotkeys, you can continue manipulating the camera as you switch them.
Don't tell me, let me guess: The reason that you posted as an A.C. is that you were too ashamed to admit that you don't know when to use "its", and when to use "it's". Am I right? I thought so.
Either does Mozilla Firefox! And as for office apps, Notepad does everything I need... Never Had it fizzle out on me either!
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
"So a 3D modeler remains, as I view it, a primarily mouse-driven interface."
I would dispute that as well.
A mouse-driven interface is something that would work well on a Tablet PC... Obviously replacing the mouse with a stylus, but they are similar in concept, so lets call them cursor-driven.
An example would be Alias Sketchbook Pro. You don't need a keyboard at all to use it until you need to save a file. That is cursor-driven.
On the other hand, in Alias Maya, I press keys on the keyboard at least as much as I click the mouse buttons. Sure, I'm not typing, and no, I wouldn't consider it keyboard-driven, but it somewhere in between.
I know I can't get anything done if I have a sandwich in my left hand.
Middle button ? I only have one button in all !
Screenie? Here's one of how I've used it since win95, with, wouldn't you know! 29 windows. Then not to forget tabs, which I start a new FF window when there's 20 or so of, and since they're treated as sub-windows, are easily navigated with ctrl+tab (and holding shift for inverse order).
The taskbar has "always on top" and "hide automatically" - so it only uses up 3 horizontal lines and is always available, checking this I see ~80 lines lost.
the sun is god
Yes you can, just right click on the taskbar and select "Undo Tile". I'm sure it works on other versions, but I only have Windows XP installed, so that's all I can speak of.
reminds me of metisse if you ask me.
http://insitu.lri.fr/~chapuis/metisse/
I can't see how? If I have the program maximized, the close button will be the X in the upper right. If I have a window open, it also maximized, the X will be under the application X. It can't get simpler than that.
the sun is god
Heh, You just wanna have a hand free at all times don't ya?
Windows: good for getting those right-click menus. Also the only way to do things that don't have obvious keyboard shortcuts - preference dialogs, toolbar buttons, etc.
I'm a windows users who has an instinct to use the keyboard. Drag & drop onto a window behind the current one? Start dragging, press alt-tab until it's selected, release alt, release mouse. Probably easier than the approach described in this article. Also, Windows is pretty good at providing keyboard interfaces to everything. In fact, I don't think there's anything in the core install of Windows that isn't keyboard accessible (although navigating web sites is tedious -- tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab... wait! shift-tab enter...). By comparison, most Linux desktops are positively keyboard unfriendly.
I agree. And they're often available on the left side, leaving the right for the mouse :-)
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Sounds good... please tell me how to do that!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
-1 Funny, not, recycled, self-referential, slashdotting
the sun is god
This looks great, I'd use it.
And just because some people prefer keyboard shortcuts, doesn't mean Fold'n'Drop can't work for others.
I use shortcuts too, but not exclusively.
I use alt-tab in conjunction with drag-n-drop all the time. It's faster than cutting a doc, using alt-tab, and pasting it. Maybe I just don't know how to organize my files and folders correctly in the first place, but I do use that feature all the time.
pffft maximize!
I rarely use that feature (if you call it that). Sure it can make windows bigger at the click of the button and in some situations it comes in handy. But for example a web browser for instance it should not maximize to my full resolution as most pages dont take advantage of that and it make them look crap.
Raymond Chen tries to explain it - also read the comments for some discussion.
Its actually because drag and drop, under MS Windows isn't managed by the window manager, but by the object linking and embedding sub-system (OLE). For - what are probably security related issues, OLE doesn nor provide a way to query a window handle for its drag drop handler. Because MS sem to ahve decided in this one case to NOT abuse undocumented functions, the shell's taskbar has no extra access that other application programs can't get - It simply cannot proxy the drag and drop even if it wanted to.
I think that might qualify as "middle". :-)
Actually, information would like a turkey sandwich.
You're using a mouse. I was questioning the awesome-mouseless-nerds who pop up whenever someone comes up with a new way for the masses to deal with their computer to tell us about how awesome they are and forget to consider that others out there don't operate in the same awesome way.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Nah.. this is a mac.
'additional mouse buttons' is button 2.
The s at the end of "additional mouse buttons" implies more than one additional button, at the very least it requires the existance of button 2 AND 3.
I have button 2 set to right click (the default),
button 3 set to show desktop,
button 4 set to show all windows,
and button 5 set to show application windows.
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
that sounds like a config issue. My default install of Windows didn't put the whole path in the title, in fact I had the chance to choose to add that, but didn't.
antipaucity
Sorry, Word was a bad choice (although document name isn't always distinguishable in the first 10 letters either). This is application specific behavior, and certain apps DO put the full path in there (sorry, not on a Windows machine to find the ones that do).