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Fold 'n' Drop Window Interaction
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jul 19, 2005 09:21 PM
from the what-about-window-smashing dept.
from the what-about-window-smashing dept.
Mints writes "Following up on recent "Desktop Innovation" stories that have left some disappointed, I thought Pierre Dragicevic's exploration of Fold 'n' Drop warranted mention. Described as "a new interaction technique for seamlessly dragging and dropping between overlapping windows", Fold 'n' Drop allows the user to interact with layered or overlapping windows in a very intuitive manner. Refreshingly, Mr. Dragicevic provides both a sample implementation, in Java, and video demos. Mr. Dragicevic is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Intuilab, Toulouse."
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Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't merely for switching between windows. If you can't RTFArticle, then RTFSummary at least.
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Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:3, Informative)
Ctrl X/C
Ctrl (Shift) Tab
Ctrl V
For me, it's actually faster (but I'm also ambidextrous, so I am equally efficient with my left hand), plus you have more control over exactly what you want in windows. When you click and drag something, in windows it will move it if it's on the same partition, or copy it if it is across partitions. Using the control keys, you don't have to second guess what partition the folder you are dragging it to is on. KDE (IIRC) will ask by default when you click a
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux: the mouse is only good for click, drag, and select/copy. Users believe the mouse is a useless add-on. On Linux, I agree.
Windows: good for getting those right-click menus. Also the only way to do things that don't have obvious keyboard shortcuts - preference dialogs, toolbar buttons, etc.
Mac: Drag and drop everywhere. Bind the middle button to Expose. Eventually you just keep your hands in the Quake position: left hand on the kb, right on the mouse. You know, a GUI.
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Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:4, Interesting)
- Qua
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Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:4, Informative)
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A-ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A-ha! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A-ha! (Score:5, Funny)
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Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Fold 'n' Drop Windows Interaction (Score:4, Funny)
Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, it looks really neat, but it's not terribly useful. Sounds like the kind of thing that would fit GREAT in Longhorn.
Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:5, Funny)
FPS...sure, call it whatever makes you feel better, buddy.
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Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seems to be running slow already... mirrordot link (Score:5, Informative)
It's already a solved problem. (Score:4, Informative)
-jcr
Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Genie effect, translucent windows during a move operation, Expose, virtual desktops, dashboard, automator, tabbed browsing, and more are things for which similar results can be achieved by slightly clunkier or slightly less intuitive/clear/natural operations. They all offer significant improvement.
It strikes me that the window folding offered on the site represents exactly the same sort of thing. Yes you can achieve the same "effect" but you can do that on Windows via the taskbar. Neither expose nor the taskbar offer the very natural and intuitive method of flipping through the windows onscreen like flipping through a bunch of papers. The metaphor is much more clear. It is a significant improvement.
Apple is not the sole source of desktop innovation.
Jedidiah.
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Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
While I don't particularly like the grouping feature of the XP taskbar, if I have several windows open it's much more efficient for me to go straight to the corresponding button on the taskbar than to leaf through a stack of open windows until I found the right one. I prefer to use the ctrl+x/c/v, but I think even right clicking and selecting copy/cut and then navigating to the appropriate window is less cumbersome than holding down the mouse to shuffle through windows.
That said, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Some people may find the shuffling method to be preferential, and it would probably be beneficial to include such a technique in a new OS.
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Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:4, Funny)
It's just second nature for me.
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Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to learn how to use a tool. A computer is a tool. Copy and paste are things you do when you use it. Nearly every program that supports copy and paste uses ctrl-c and ctrl-v and many keyboards even print "copy" and "paste" as hints. Ok, the Mac goes and uses the "Apple" key ins
Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
Firstly, I couldn't immediately figure out how to make the windows fold. Sure, when you move the mouse outside a window it begins to fold slightly. But it folds right back almost instanly, leaving you puzzled. I tried moving them mouse back when I saw the fold, but had no luck. It turned out that I just wasn't fast enough, but I didn't realize it until I went and read the site's directions, figur
Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Neat! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Neat! (Score:3, Funny)
Please note (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you. I will be announcing my API Real Soon Now.
I got dibs on: (Score:3, Funny)
Mac OS X Expose and Drag & Drop (Score:5, Informative)
I have it set up so that I can literally "yank" the mouse in the general direction of the lower-right corner to show all windows, perhaps after picking up a file with the mouse. This then allows me to drag the file to any window. Further, I can use spacebar (like in spring-loaded folders in the Finder) to immediately choose a window instead of pausing for a second to have it selected automatically.
This action is so natural and powerful, I use it all the time. And though I use Linux at work and it is fantastic in many ways, I sorely miss features like Expose in Mac OS X.
Re:Mac OS X Expose and Drag & Drop (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Left Button = Left-Click
2. Right Button = Right-Click
3. Scroll Click = Expose Show Application's Windows
4. Thumb Button = Expose Show All Windows
5. Second Thumb Button = Expose Show Desktop
This way, you can easily Drag from one window to any other window with the click of a button, also allowing you to switch quickly between apps. You can also get different
Re:Mac OS X Expose and Drag & Drop (Score:4, Funny)
The Inquisition will see you now.
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More trouble than it's worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always nice to see new ways to interact, but I can't recall a single time this would have been useful in the past week. My memory can't recall much more than that, but the folding corners would certainly annoy me more often than it would actually be useful.
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. I'm doing plugin development for Lightwave. I have a small LW window open. I have my editor open. I have a few file windows open. (Yes, I need them for this.) I have a PDF viewer open for documentation. I have a web browser open for accessing the knowledgebase. I sometimes even have an ICQ window open so I can talk to the people testing the code. I run dual monitors at 1600 by 1200 each, and I still have a bunch of overlapping going on.
Couldn't tell you if this particular desktop management system would do me any good or not (couldn't get the page to load) but I'll take any help I can get.
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Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting way of doing things ... (Score:3, Informative)
Once I figured out how it was worked, I found myself wondering how useful it would be to be able to just fold back the corners of a window when I wasn't dragging a file.
The general idea of peeling back the corner of a window seems like it might be actually useful at times. Sometimes the rigidly rectangular window can get in the way.
Of course, I'm sure it would eat CPU like all graphical candy, but cycles are cheap I guess.
Alternatively ... (Score:5, Funny)
Not so useful for me. (Score:5, Informative)
I usually have more than 10 windows open, I don't want to waste time peeling through them one by one, especially when I know exactly which window it is (I just recently clicked its task button after all).
Once I have a taskbar, I don't often have to remember which windows are "below" or "above" each other. I just need to remember which task button represents the window to get to it.
Which comes to a related point - KDE orders the tasks on the taskbar top to bottom, left to right. This means that if you remove a task, the ALL of the tasks to the right of it will change their vertical positions. This is bad UI IMO. However the person in charge prefers it the way it is[1].
Windows does it left to right first then top to bottom. This means that only leftmost and rightmost tasks change positions if you remove one, so it's not as much of a mess trying to remember where a window is.
[1] Nope he doesn't go check with the "people in charge of Usability", because there aren't any. Which probably explains why Linux still has a mediocre GUI in terms of usability.
Style over substance (Score:3, Interesting)
How many people actually move/copy files in this manner anyway? I suppose Jo(e) Average may but surely anyone who uses a computer at all regularly would copy and paste - I've even seen people copy/cut and paste using menus more than I have seen them drag and drop between open windows.
Neat trick, but... next!
UI innovation and the Slashdot audience (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a new UI concept, that is very promising and hasn't been implemented anywhere yet. A true opportunity for Linux to score a "first" in UI design -- this could be the next generation of window shading/rollup, the possibilities are endless.
And the comments are "in Mac OSX you do such-and-such instead", "in Windows you do such-and-such instead". Things like "this problem is solved" -- as if there was One True Solution in UI design! -- and "before doing your research you should stop at the Apple store" -- as if PhD research didn't do related work assessment! --, enumerations of Windows key sequences, and so on. And those are ranked "5, Insightful".
A few years ago the comments would range from the usual "GUI? Give me a CLI any day" to discussions on how to implement this on Linux and which wm would get it first, which would (d?)evolve to a healthy wm flamefest.
The Slashdot audience truly has changed. *sigh*
Re:UI innovation and the Slashdot audience (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to comment on the topic: to me GUI innovation relates to how this fits into your cognitive space. On that note, I'll say that I find Ion a GUI that fits right in the UNIXspace. Being unprejudiced, it mixes freely between CLI and GUI. You can switch between shell and graphical applications without having to resort to mouse clicks (and if you use a keyboard, contrary to some misconceptions, you still are using your hands)
Not changed that much...! (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I wish the computer cognoscenti *would* give more emphasis to truly graphical computing.
The fact that the keyboard is more efficient for interacting with the majority of computer operations that people do really just goes to show that our culture hasn't advanced from thinking in pipelineable data chunks to true objects.
For much software, config files, switches, and option params still dominate over graphical dialogs, and even those that do exist in polished software are still just checkbox and radio equivalents of config settings, not real objects in the sense of "chopsticks interacting with noodles" (associating entities with containers).
Even most GUIs are simply visual equivalents of the same verb-noun operations that CLIs have always used, eg, graphically foo.txt dragging up a level is the same as mv foo.txt
I think the future is somewhere in the way non-linear video editing suites and graphical art programs work, but more consistent.
Hopefully now that OSes are moving to 3rd gen windowing architectures that allow much more complex visual depictions (OS X a few years ago, Longhorn next year, Linux real soon), more experiments like this will be tried, and new interactions will emerge.
Although this post has made no sense, here's to truly graphical computing!
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Re:UI innovation and the Slashdot audience (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote a few posts a few days ago on this, but I'll repeat...
As much as people talk about innovation, few really want such a thing. That's how it has always been.
Instead of innovation, people want familiarity. Which is why many people years ago did not want to move from text console to X11 when hardware and drivers were finally reasonable. I was one of those people, sadly. You couldn't get me to touch an xterm (or rxvt, my preferred). That is, until I discovered those nice terminal fonts and how it was possible to change the default xterm colors to that of a VGA textmode terminal. That is what I still use today.
I try to be as open-minded as possible, but I catch myself doing those same things today. I've had many discussions with people who claim to want innovation when they really want upgrades to the things they already use. There isn't much innovative about switching from devfs to udev, etc. yet quite a few act as if innovation occurs often.
Given the choice between backwards compatibility or innovation, hardware and software manufacturers will always choose backwards compatibility. Only because that is what the end-user always wants.
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Force Feedback! (Score:5, Interesting)
jm2c
GUI Inconsistancies... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for the improvement and innovation of interface design. Making a design intuitive increases productivity, even among power users who may do a particular action only once among a few thousand, and may not have it as ingrained as expected. That said, there are some major drawbacks to this design that may serve to make it less productive and even less intuitive.
Counter-Intuitive Metaphors
Metaphorical abstractions for computer objects only work if they have a clear representation of being similar to object they represent. While some windows (text boxes, for example) have a clear similarity to being a leaf of paper, many others do not; directory windows seem fairly unrelated to 2d objects: they contain multiple objects inside of them, likening them more to being a box or drawer, some 3d abstraction. Thus it is not only counter-intuitive to "fold-over" an object which has depth, but also brutally forcing a metaphor onto an object of which could suggest a completely alien mental abstraction from the one a user original envisioned. For this reason, almost all interface references to real-world objects are either extremely obvious or very broad in definition. The "focus" metaphor works, for instance, because you can bring any object (one with depth or no depth) and put it on top of another object, thus bringing it into "focus" or plain-sight; it is an extremely simple and all-encompassing concept.
Temporality and Spacial Complexity
The second problem with this method is its inherent temporality. Most GUI operation requires no timing, and in the rare cases that timing is required (ie: double-clicking, hovering over spring loaded folder), the operation is extremely simple and requires no precision. The one exception is double-clicking, and you can witness its result by watching any surface user fail to open a folder because they can't keep the mouse still while clicking the left mouse button. The folding operation illustrated here, on the other hand, is an extremely complex operation that takes some very precise timing. Even I, an experienced computer user (as we all are), had to practice it many times to double-back on my mouse movement fast enough to correctly "fold-over" a window. Since windows move and change in organization, the operation is slightly different each time it is performed. I can already tell that even if it the operation becomes somewhat natural, I'll always continue to miss on occasion because of it's complexity. And if I'm having trouble with it, I can't imagine what it would be like for my parents!
UPDATE: I had my mother test it out to see if a surface user could cope with it, and after struggling with it for a few minutes, finaly gave up.
Accidents and Set-backs
The third problem I for-see is that folding can easily occur unintentionally and is difficult to undo. Spring loaded folders and "snap-to" focusing work well because their actions inherently require a very specific action: going over a folder and waiting for about a half a second for the window to pop up. Since the cursor is going to be generally moving while dragging objects, a half-second wait over a folder or partly obscured window is abnormal and requires intentionality. Even then, it is as easily (if not more easily) reversed as it done by simply moving off the newly focused window. With folding, on the other hand, it's easy to see how any quick movement during a drag could activate the effect, and when the process of folding is started, it takes an even more complex spacial action to set it back, that being the looping around and back onto the fold from the other side.
Just a few thoughts on intuitive interface design, using this as an example of what works and what doesn't.
Re:Does it solve a problem that exists??? (Score:5, Funny)
:Grumbles: Friggin advanced users think they can just add dimensions wherever they damn well please
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Re:Does it solve a problem that exists??? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:WTF???? (Score:4, Insightful)
Step three: Wait half a second for window "B" become the modal window and release.
What happens if the target window is completely obscured by the front window? If there is no overlapping edge for you to move towards and wait for focus to be given to the underlying windows?
From what I've seen, Mac OS really is the best with regard to user interaction tricks. It's the smoothest and best interface around. However, this new technique seems to have some advantages in terms of smoothness and it is intuitive. Clicking on a keyboard button may accomplish the same thing in the current Mac OS, but then again in Windows you can drag down to the taskbar and wait for that window to gain focus. It's just not as elegant as what's being proposed here. I, for one, think this sounds cool! You can push away the front window(s) and see what was previously obscured.
(Then again, I have not used Mac OS X that much and maybe what they already have is better than what is being proposed here... but still I think it's a neat idea worthy of consideration for any GUI.)
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Re:I dunno (Score:4, Insightful)
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