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Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

jgthms.com

101–110 of 158 posts

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#101

Apple Newton had a way to drag/copy things around, a visual clipboard of sorts. They used a stilus, so it's similar. You drag an object to a side of the screen, where it turns into a visible but small handle and stucks. I think it could stay there any time and you could have several objects arranged this way. Then you can go anyplace, including a different application. Once you're in the right place, you could drag a…

Apple Newton had smell-o-vision? It was really ahead of its time.

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#103

Brilliant! Its been a while since I've seen a brand new UX patten. As some others have mentioned, the picked state needs to be a bit more clear. Some suggestions - 1. As a border around 'Pick' to indicate it as an action 2. Once an item is picked, add a mask on the whole page, with only the picked item in front of the mask. (This is going to be a bit challenging, I'm guessing, to show the gaps between the items as yo…

I also hate drag and drop.

It'd be good if when you picked something it automatically added the border too - otherwise I think this won't work on short pages?

I have some hesitations though - relying on scroll as the positioning method means that if you don't have a fine-grained scroll method e.g. on desktop, if you have a non-continuous wheel, you'll need to rely on "drag and dropping" the scroll bar, which doesn't really improve things (and has its own issues if your page is very long).

I think I'd prefer something other than scroll-to-position. Like what about making gaps between items with a "drop" button? Or adding up/down arrow buttons to the "picked" element so that fine grained adjustments could be done?

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#104
I really don’t like this. It took me several attempts to figure out what was going on.

And even after I had finally figured it out, it still felt more like a rendering glitch than good UX.

If I struggled then I really can’t see this working for non-technical folk.

Worse yet, because people wouldn’t expect this behaviour coupled with the fact that scrolling shouldn’t have any changes to the website state, you’ll likely see people constantly making accidental changes to the ordering of the list.

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#105
This is really nice and a very original take. It feels good on mobile / other touch devices.

I'd love to see it feel a bit more polished on desktop (maybe I'll give that a shot if I find a bit of spare time!) - I could see a few simple things like adding up/down arrows to the picked item and wiring into up and down arrow presses going a long way to making it work really well there too.

Genuinely, thank you for sharing this, it's something different and interesting.

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#106

Apple Newton had a way to drag/copy things around, a visual clipboard of sorts. They used a stilus, so it's similar. You drag an object to a side of the screen, where it turns into a visible but small handle and stucks. I think it could stay there any time and you could have several objects arranged this way. Then you can go anyplace, including a different application. Once you're in the right place, you could drag a…

Apple Newton had smell-o-vision? It was really ahead of its time.

Did I write that? Oh, right. Fixed. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#109
post #13

This looks like an interesting concept! > I find that the drag and drop experience can quickly become a nightmare, especially on mobile. To me, drag and drop is only a nightmare on mobile. On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well. Your design experiment reminds me of a recent talk of Scott Jenson, where he talked about how we just took over established UX patterns from desktop t…

> On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well. Strong disagree here. It is intuitive, it is easy to demonstrate. But it's not really convenient, especially on a trackpad. I have enough mouse agility to play RTS games but not to do a reliable drag-and-drop, especially in a complicated case - across windows, with scroll, etc.

On macOS, I find “3 finger drag” very convenient to use, and for me it works a lot better than “press and hold”. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102341) It even allows you to briefly lift your fingers to reposition them on the trackpad without stopping the drag action.

Re: Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while holding the drag finger down I'm not sure if this is common on other desktop operating systems but the 'Drag Lock' feature on macOS allows you to double-tap an item, then drag it without holding the button down to begin a drag. At that point lifting your finger continues the drag until you tap once to release it. I would be amazed at how many people using macOS have never found this option except I'm not sure…

Double tap or double click is to open a file. If you're using it to do anything else, that's so counter intuitive.

I never said it was intuitive, only that it exists ;)

I’d argue that double-click to open a file is also not intuitive, but it is now the expected behaviour. Documents don’t have to be touched twice in real life to have them open and reveal their secrets. Plus, I do use Drag Lock, so that behaviour now does feel intuitive to me.

There’s a lot to be said for what is effectively learned behaviour in intuition.

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