Re: Drag and drop is dead, long live drab and throw :)

[Toby Jaffey <psystrj unix ccc nottingham ac uk>]

On Thu, Jun 17, 1999 at 01:40:05PM -0300, Victor Bogado da Silva Lins wrote:
> Ian McKellar wrote:


> > >       The other problem I see is the precision, if drag and drop is dificult
> > > because of mouse precision imagine trying to throw an icon into a
> > > folder? The target areas must be very large, in your little program the
> > > black areas for instance were somewhat small, if yoy try to throw at
> > > something that is exactly bellow the origin you have a chaotic
> > > behaviour, since a small change of a few pixels could change the result
> > > very much.

> > How about grab-n-throw "gravity". We could assign "mass" too all drag-n-drop
> > objects and targets. I found that most of my throws went just off the side.
> > If there was a bit of gravity they would have hit home. Then of course we've
> > got to introduce other astrophysical concepts like magnetism, elecric charge
> > and karma to GTK/GNOME widgets :-)

> 	Hey wouldn't be fun watching a icon "orbiting a target after a throw.
>:-)

> 	Sure a gravity would be useful, but could lead to unexpected results.
> But I do think that this concept has some kind of future.

> 	How about this :

> 	I want to organize icons using throwing, what do I do? 

> 	1) open 1 or more "black hole"'s objects. Once there is one or more
> black holes open the drag operations with icons are interpreted as a
> throw not a a drop anymore. Each black hole has a event orizon that
> would decide if the icon fell in the black hole or not.

> 	2) I start  thowing icon into the balck holes I opened, when I finished
> I could drag the black hole and drop it into a folder/desktop icon or
> what-ever and it would send all files that he swallowed into the folder
> and close it self.  Once all black holes are actualy used, the operation
> resumes to normal.

> 	Comments, please...

So, basically, you're saying divide the screen up between a bunch of
drop sites where the boundaries are 'event horizons'? This makes far
more sense than gravity. You could then hit some hotkey to show the
divisions that the screen is using for each dropsite?

I was thinking more of assigning each drop site to a series of shell
commands (or a script). So one might be, 'mv $1 /home/fred/', another
may be 'rm $1'.. etc.

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