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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."
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
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"It's fun to use and all, but why would I have that many windows open, and then need to sort a lot of documents through them? Moreover, with dual screens and/or multiple desktops, overlapping windows should be mostly a thing of the past."
Nope. I'm doing plugin development for Lightwave. I have a small LW window open. I have my editor open. I have a few file windows open. (Yes, I need them for this.) I have a PDF viewer open for documentation. I have a web browser open for accessing the knowledgebase. I sometimes even have an ICQ window open so I can talk to the people testing the code. I run dual monitors at 1600 by 1200 each, and I still have a bunch of overlapping going on.
Couldn't tell you if this particular desktop management system would do me any good or not (couldn't get the page to load) but I'll take any help I can get.
"Derp de derp."
You should try mapping Expose to a multi-button mouse. I have a 5 button mouse that has each Expose function mapped to a separate button.
1. Left Button = Left-Click
2. Right Button = Right-Click
3. Scroll Click = Expose Show Application's Windows
4. Thumb Button = Expose Show All Windows
5. Second Thumb Button = Expose Show Desktop
This way, you can easily Drag from one window to any other window with the click of a button, also allowing you to switch quickly between apps. You can also get different reactions by holding the button down, which temporarily switches to that Expose mode, then returns to last mode when released, or when you click on it, it turns to that Expose mode until you click another button.
It REALLY hurts when I am working on a non-Expose enabled computer. Longhorn will only speed-up the switch to OSX, especially when compared to the new Macintel's loaded with OSX.5 Leopard, and its Red-Box abilities(Built-in VirtualPC abilities similar to Classic mode)
Cheers to Apple.
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
While your comments are insightful and this is a neat idea, Expose will always be faster. And I'm not talking about performance. Picture this, you need to move a file to another folder, but wait that folder is two layers below your current level. You'll have to fold back two windows to get there! Now imagine having to fold 5 or more folders. Since Expose can show you all your windows with one action it wins hands down.
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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
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)
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!