Usability of using icons to illustrate DnD

[Ralf Nolden]

On Saturday 27 April 2002 23:00, Zack Rusin wrote:

Zack, I gave this a second thought. The point why we can't see anything is 
just the icon size. Other environments display the icon half-transparent so 
you can see what's underneath; but nevertheless, you "drag" something with 
the mouse; so it is not *really* wise to display the icon *under* the 
mousecursor. As Waldo said in that other mail, the drop zone should indicate 
that visually (which it does everywhere on one or the other way).

I would wait to change this behavoir and rather fix the icon size for now to 
16x16, which, if I'm correct, can be done in kdelibs; for konqueror maybe it 
would be better to not display the previews during d'nd but just the 
mime-type icon.

Anyway we do it, we do it halfway wrong I feel... Tackat, what's your 
experience here ?

Ralf

 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

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Ralf Nolden
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