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do you know of any elegant solution to handle drag...
# thinking-together
m
do you know of any elegant solution to handle dragging things long distances or dragging more than one thing from the same origin to the same target (in terms of distance, can be different sources and targets). Similarly, do you know of a nice solution to drag/drop on touch devices? Both usually involve scrolling in my case
d
Cut and Paste via the clipboard, possibly using a multiple selection.
a
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dropzone-3/id695406827?mt=12
Just drop files on the target and they stick there until you’re ready to use them. You can even combine groups of files into stacks and then drop them onto a Dropzone action or onto another app.
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m
@Anukul Sangwan that was my idea 🙂
a
neat! i’ve found a bunch of apps like this on the mac store that would make for great additions to the OS
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c
you could use the concept of a “bag”? when you’ve selected one or more things, you could drop them into a bag and then go to the place where you need to use them and drag them out of the bag. could be useful for dragging a group of things from one place to many, or for dragging many things from many places to one
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the Magic Cap OS had this concept and in retrospect it’s a bit of a shame we got saddled with “the clipboard” instead
s
The NeXTstep File Browser used a “shelf” for this. I loved that feature and was sad to see it removed in OSX. Maybe OSX considers the desktop itself as the shelf, as you can drop items there but could not on NeXTstep.
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Btw, I’d love to see a video or write-up of the interesting interactions and gestures used on older devices (Newton, MagicCap, Go, SketchPad, Smalltalk, Self, etc) that haven’t (yet) been adopted on modern platforms. I recently noticed that Newton had a tap-drag to copy an item vs drag to move interaction that I thought was nice.
i
Tap-drag to copy sounds a bit like option-drag to copy, which is a near universal standard.
There was a beloved Mac utility that did the "floating shelf you can temporarily drop stuff on" thing, but after 24 years it just died due to the end of 32-bit support. https://dragthing.com
s
@Ivan Reese I’m familiar with option drag to copy, but it wasn’t obvious to me that tap would be used as an option modifier in a touch UI. I might have guessed holding two fingers down before dragging would mean copy, as I think that’s clearer and less prone to error, but that wasn’t available to those early single touch interfaces.
i
The only touch example I can think of is.. tap-drag is used in Google Maps to zoom rather than pan with 1 finger. I love it.
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