Re: drag and drop saving.

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 08:22:21PM +0200, Erik Bågfors wrote:
> Adding too many options to a program (or desktop or...)
> is not good since people will get confused.

People have tried a lot of different ways around this.

One way was to have a button that made a dialogue box grow larger
and present more options, rather like the hidden trays in some video
recorders or radio receivers.  Open look did that.

Another way is to have a button for additional options, that brings up
another dialogue box.  Windows did this, as anyone who has ever
had to talk someone through changing a setting knows all too well.

Multics was known for having lots of options; an early strength of
Unix was that it factored out programs into separate tools that could
be combined.  A weakness was that you had to combine tools to get
anything done.

These days, Linux has as many options per tool as early versions of Unix
had altogether, and part of that is a lack of vision: it's easier to
add a feature to a program than to refactor into several programs.
Standards have hindered too, because they froze the factoring.


Personally, I stand by the idea that the way you open a file is to
drag it from Nautilus into your program's Input Bay, and you save by
dragging out from the Launching Bay :-)

Sun started something like this in OpenWindows 3.2 or so, with every
program having a rectangular "drag source" representing the current
document, and a "drop site" for receiving documents.  But then the
product was dropped, so I don't know if there were any usability studies.

Lee


-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001