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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."
yeah designing 3-d models is great fun with the keyboard.
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.
There is absolutely no way you can justify ctrl-c ctrl-v from a usability perspective. It's a monstrosity.
How we know is more important than what we know.