Re: Usability problem, and solution proposal

[Christian Schneider <c schneider scram de>]

paul hendrick wrote:

> I've written up an idea for a bug in nautilus usabilty. the writeup is here:
> http://www.student.livjm.ac.uk/cmsphend/gnome/nautilus.html
>
> i hope it's useful. 
>
>  
I also think that drag and drop has to be improved. When I drag files to 
copy or move them I alsways encounter the same problem. I first open the 
destination folder. Then I open the source folder. At the start of the 
drag the source folder is always on top and overlaps a big part of the 
destination. I can of course move  target and source folder first so 
they are beneath each other but this goes against the spatial idea in my 
opinion. The basic idea of spatial nautilus is that you position your 
important folder windows at certain places so you can remember these 
positions well. If you have to move them around all the time for 
dragging this principle does not work anymore.

I have two solutions for the problem:

1)
We provide a way of moving the window under the mouse to the top or the 
bottom. What about using the right mouse key for this. So a drag would 
work in the following way:

Start drag with holding left mouse button on the source file. Then you 
can click the right mouse button to move the source window to the bottom 
of the window stack. So you get a full view of the target window. In the 
same way you could use the right mouse button to bring the target window 
up if you see at least a part of it.

2)
We provide a kind of a visual clipboard. When you start the drag the 
clipboard appears at the right bottom of the screen. You can then drag 
the file to the clipboard and drop it there. Then you bring the target 
folder up and drag the file from the clipboard to the target folder.

What do you guys think about these suggestions. I think they could even 
both be implemented. If you want I can also draw some mockups.

greets

Christian Schneider

http://www.liquid-reality.de