Styles for drag-and-drop?

[Eli Cochran]

Anastasia,
First let me use this moment to introduce myself. My name is Eli  
Cochran, and I'll be joining ETS at UC Berkeley in mid-July as a  
Interaction Developer. I don't know exactly what I'll be working on  
yet but I'm reading the lists and trying to get up to speed.

Having recently thought through your questions 2 and 3 a bit, let me  
tell you my choice and why.

I choose to leave a dimmed representation of the thumb in the  
starting position and to use a bar to indicate where the item was  
going to drop with out moving or disturbing the position of the other  
thumbs.

My rational was that if you collapse the original position or expand  
the target position then the other thumbnails and subsequently the  
target (where you're dragging to) location may move while you're  
dragging, making it harder to hit the target with the ponter. If you  
only collapse the starting position then the position of items only  
changes once. If you expand each target position as you pass over it  
then the other thumbs are going to be shifting position each time you  
move the pointer to a new target position. Admittedly the target  
position should stay relatively stable and only the items after the  
target will move, but even this might be disorienting.

I'd love to hear other ideas.

Sincerely,
Eli Cochran



On Jun 20, 2007, at 11:43 AM, a.cheetham at utoronto.ca wrote:

>
> We're currently implementing the mouse-based drag-and-drop
> functionality in the Lightbox, and it has raised questions about what
> the interface should look like when mousing and clicking, etc.
>
> Questions:
>
> Should the appearance of a thumb change to our 'active' look when
> moused over, or should this only happen when clicked on?
>
> While a thumb is being dragged, should a representation of it stay
> somehow where it was originally? If so, what should it look like?
> (Note: If nothing stays there, the space collapses and all of the
> subsequent images move.)
>
> How should 'previewing' of the target location behave? Should a ghost
> of the thumb be placed in the target location, or should it be a
> vertical bar, like iPhoto, or something else?
>
>
> -- 
> Anastasia Cheetham                   a.cheetham at utoronto.ca
> Software Designer, Fluid Project
> Adaptive Technology Resource Centre / University of Toronto
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fluid-work mailing list
> fluid-work at fluidproject.org
> http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work

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