Usability of using icons to illustrate DnD

[Zack Rusin]

On Saturday 27 April 2002 13:06, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> Hello
>
> This little rant is prompted by a recent change in KMail that makes
> so that DnD operations on messages doesn't use the default grey
> rectangle anymore, but a suggestive icon.
>
> My pet peeve with this new little feature (and I believe it extends
> to all DnD operations in KDE) is that the suggestive icon gets
> centered to the mouse pointer. This is annoying because this makes
> very difficult to target tiny drop zones. The pointing pin of the
> cursor arrow (associated with a moving mouse) is in the middle of the
> suggestive icon and this makes it difficult to point with.
>
> It should be better, IMHO, if the icon would be displaced to the
> right-down of the cursor (for a left to right language) or to the
> left-down (for a right to left language). Is there any reason agains
> this improvement? If not, is it OK for me to investigate it (I
> believe, without looking, that I'd have to look into Qt) ?

Well, the first version of this (KMail) patch actually worked this way 
(icon on the lower-right of the cursor). Marc didn't like it, since it 
wasn't consistent with what Konqueror does, so I change it. I don't 
mind switching it back again, but consistency is very important to me 
across desktop environment. If we all agree that lower-right is better, 
than just give me OK to switch that behavior all over CVS apps/libs, 
and I'll do it today, because it kind of bugs me just as well. I'm not 
sure about the icon size though. Small is good for KMail, but might not 
work all that good for other operations, e.g. drag&drop in Konqueror. 
So to me: 
lower-right -> consistently in all applications,
size -> application specific

Zack

-- 
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and 
wrong. 
-- H L Mencken