unity-design team mailing list archive

[Roberto Guido <bob4job@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 19:53 +0100, frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> These are the problems you identify, when observing people with little
> computer knowledge. They simply want to get stuff done, and find
> nothing but challenges in their way, instead of being presented with
> obvious friendly and nice-looking solutions.
>  
The technical problem here is to provide a graphical element to select
in order to obtain every kind of interation between applications and
contents.

In the mentioned example, Shotwell would need a well visible "share with
IM contact" button in the interface. And perhaps a "share by mail" one.
And "share on Flickr". And "post on ImageShak". And "copy to other
device in LAN". Or "set this image as frame in the video currently
opened in PiTiVi".
And all those options would be replicated in every other application:
Empathy, Totem, Rhythmbox and so on.

I think drag'n'drop is an efficient solution for "graphical
inter-process communication", with the only problem to be barely
discoverable by the user: there is no evident button with a descriptive
label to press, and sometime it happens a drag'n'drop action provides
something different than what expected. This limitation is now evident
with popular tablets usage.

Years ago I tried to explore potentials of complex drag'n'drop
operations (here a short article about ->
http://lobotomy.sourceforge.net/docs/Mixing_Types-v0.1.html . Probably
the mockup is more interesting than the text. Nothing was never
implemented :-\ ); recently I took again that concept to image how to
realize it on top of Tracker ontologies, currently I have no
documentation to expose but if you like the idea I can try to describe
it better ;-)


-- 
Roberto -MadBob- Guido
http://claimid.com/madbob