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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.
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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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
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."
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.
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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.
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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.
:Grumbles: Friggin advanced users think they can just add dimensions wherever they damn well please
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
... I find a sharp blow to the Solar Plexus will also produce a satisfying fold and drop.
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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.
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.
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
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.
What happens if the target window is completely obscured by the front window? If there is no overlapping edge for you to move towards and wait for focus to be given to the underlying windows?
From what I've seen, Mac OS really is the best with regard to user interaction tricks. It's the smoothest and best interface around. However, this new technique seems to have some advantages in terms of smoothness and it is intuitive. Clicking on a keyboard button may accomplish the same thing in the current Mac OS, but then again in Windows you can drag down to the taskbar and wait for that window to gain focus. It's just not as elegant as what's being proposed here. I, for one, think this sounds cool! You can push away the front window(s) and see what was previously obscured.
(Then again, I have not used Mac OS X that much and maybe what they already have is better than what is being proposed here... but still I think it's a neat idea worthy of consideration for any GUI.)
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
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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.
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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!
Well, once you get used to them, they are neat stuff, though true they are odd at first. I'm a heavy mouse gesture user, I can't comfortably use a webbrowser without gestures. A friend commented on me: "You know, it looks funny. You don't point at anything and things change, you click in completely random places and move the cursor around in some chaotic manner, then things happen, or not, I know you're using mouse gestures but just watching you webbrowsing freaks me out."
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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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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.
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