July 27, 2004

drag-and-pop

I found a neat demo of drag-and-pop technology. The concept is... when a user wants to drag an icon onto another one, why make them go the whole way? It's very intuitive, and pretty snazzy. When you begin dragging, the program looks at icons in the direction you're going and "rubber-bands" them to the one under your mouse. The original concept was to compensate for having to move the mouse several times on high-res, large computer screens, but it works great on small screens too. I'd love to see this implemented as an add-on in Win 2K and other non-MS operating systems.

I ran across this at channel9.msdn.com while looking for something else. It's Microsoft Research's blog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For all those over-worked people for whom dragging a mouse that extra inch is just too much effort???

I can imagine what will be coming next - perhaps a pressure-sensitive keyboard that pulls the keys down the rest of the way once a certain amount of pressure is exerted. Just think of all the energy that could be saved if you didn't have to push the keys all the way down! ;-)

Tim

John Watts said...

Don't count on it showing up in Windows. PC Magazine's Dvorak has a juicy conspiracy theory that would explain everything from Sun settling its lawsuit with Microsoft to reasons why Microsoft is giving away billions to share holders.