Usability of using icons to illustrate DnD

[Waldo Bastian]

On Saturday 27 April 2002 10:06 am, 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.

The (tiny) dropzone should visually indicate when it becomes the potential 
target for a DnD operation. After dropping it should show a popup-menu to 
make clear beyond doubt what is going to happen and to give the user an 
option to back out.

I'm afraid thoguh that the above is one of the least implemented 
recommendations of the style guide :-(

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org  |   SuSE Labs KDE Developer  |  bastian at suse.com