3 ms·

It's not about imitating a desktop application, but about having a usable interface with one. For example: Let's say I'm one of those wackos who keeps a zillio

by Qz 17y ago

It's not about imitating a desktop application, but about having a usable interface with one. For example: Let's say I'm one of those wackos who keeps a zillion files on my desktop. I want to upload a picture to imageshack or whatever. The way we've been forced to do this for years now is to click the browse button on the webpage, navigate to the desktop folder,and finally scroll down through a zillion files to find the one image I want to upload. Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. I realize there are apps that let you do this kind of drag and drop uploading, but that's exactly the point -- apps did this easily, so there really was absolutely no reason for it to take years for drag and drop to finally make it into HTML. Thinking in terms of desktop vs mobile is narrow-sighted. What's at stake here is pushing forward the browser (aka: web) interaction experience, regardless of platform.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Safari has done this for as long as it has existed, since the ability is baked right into Mac OS X. Open any file dialog (or the terminal) and dropping files on it works the same as navigating (or typing) the hierarchy to that file. Sounds to me like the popular Windows desktops are the ones innovating at a snail's pace. Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd blame the same party for holding back the web.
- Qz 17y ago
  You're right, and it's insane that you can't drag a file to the browser dialog on windows. But that doesn't make it less insane that you couldn't drag a file directly to a webpage until just recently. I don't think that it's just browsers that aren't innovating -- desktop UIs have been stale crufty shit for years. OSX may have had some improvements but it's still a lot of cruft. Ubuntu seems to be doing some interesting things recently, but that doesn't get linux off the hook for not doing interesting things earlier (and I'm speaking here about average-user-friendliness, not cool stuff for us hacker types). To be honest, I think a lot of the innovation in mobile UIs has come from the fact that it was hard/impossible to port over the old UI, so they actually had to think up something new. Touch and form-factor are just the constraints that forced people to actually think about UI. Desktop UIs could be orders of magnitude better if the OS shell teams were put in the same situation.
  - ericd 17y ago
    Keep in mind that iPhone just happened to be a breakthrough in phone UI. Windows Mobile has been around for many years before the iPhone was more than a dream in Jobs' head. It's only recently that smartphones have actually become usable and not just frustrating toys. What are these orders of magnitude you speak of on the desktop side? I don't frequently find myself wishing OS X did much differently.
    - Qz 17y ago
      The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's better than it was, but it's still pretty terrible and a lot of that has to do with its legacy. For iPhone they really sat down and thought, what actually works on a smartphone? This took a long damn time as far as I'm concerned. I have a motorola phone from 2008 and the interface is godawful and makes me want to tear things apart every time I have to navigate its unwieldly menu system. My previous phone was from 2004 -- there was almost no improvement from one to the next. As for the desktop, a lot of where I see potential is in interactivity between programs. Pretty much any time there is interactivity between programs these days it's because the application developers programmed it in, and I think there's a huge opportunity to weave application interactivity into the desktop shell itself, so that things Just Work, without everyone having to code that stuff up all the time. There's also, in my experience, a crapload of user time wasted doing menial things like window management that doesn't need to happen. Those are just a few things -- don't want to give away all my ideas...
      - ericd 17y ago
        Right, but how do you see that happening with desktop OS's? Their limitations were already largely thought through at Xerox PARC decades ago, and that's how the mouse and windowing systems were born - they're very good methods of dealing with the limited screen real estate. If anything, there are less limitations on them now. Touch tablets are potentially an area for expansion, but I don't know that I've seen anything that warrants a radical change on the desktop. As for the menial tasks, I do next to no window management - my screens are completely unorganized, but a combination of Expose, alt-tab/tilde, and Quicksilver tend to make that a nonissue.
what 17y ago
> Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. What makes drag and drop more usable than the browser's file selector dialog? Using your example: For drag and drop you would have to minimize the browser to see the zillion files, scan the icons that are in some random order to find the file and then drag it to your browser. With the file selector it's a few clicks to get an organized list, a flick of the scroll wheel and a double click to open. I'm not convinced that drag and drop is any easier or more convenient, it actually seems like more effort.
- Qz 17y ago
  The zillion file person was a hypothetical, but I'll give you a real world example: I use two monitors, and I tend to arrange files I'm working with into groups on the two desktops. I have the browser open in one window, and since I know what the groups are (and they're arranged to not overlap with my browser window), finding a particular file that I would want to drag to imageshack takes a fraction of a second, drag and dropping would take another second max. Finding the file in the browser dialog ignores all the grouping and placement I have done on the desktop and just sorts things by filename. It takes significantly longer for me to find files with that dialog than the 1.5 seconds to drag a file to firefox.
  - what 17y ago
    Fair enough. If you've taken the time to organize the icons, you probably know where everything is. But when I think of some one with a zillion files on their desktop, I picture a disorganized jumble of icons. Plus the second monitor probably helps. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
    - Qz 17y ago
      I mean, it's probably not very helpful on a netbook with a 1024x600 screen, but I still think its worth it on your average desktop flatscreen.

by Qz 17y ago

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Safari has done this for as long as it has existed, since the ability is baked right into Mac OS X. Open any file dialog (or the terminal) and dropping files on it works the same as navigating (or typing) the hierarchy to that file. Sounds to me like the popular Windows desktops are the ones innovating at a snail's pace. Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd blame the same party for holding back the web.

Qz 17y ago
You're right, and it's insane that you can't drag a file to the browser dialog on windows. But that doesn't make it less insane that you couldn't drag a file directly to a webpage until just recently. I don't think that it's just browsers that aren't innovating -- desktop UIs have been stale crufty shit for years. OSX may have had some improvements but it's still a lot of cruft. Ubuntu seems to be doing some interesting things recently, but that doesn't get linux off the hook for not doing interesting things earlier (and I'm speaking here about average-user-friendliness, not cool stuff for us hacker types). To be honest, I think a lot of the innovation in mobile UIs has come from the fact that it was hard/impossible to port over the old UI, so they actually had to think up something new. Touch and form-factor are just the constraints that forced people to actually think about UI. Desktop UIs could be orders of magnitude better if the OS shell teams were put in the same situation.
- ericd 17y ago
  Keep in mind that iPhone just happened to be a breakthrough in phone UI. Windows Mobile has been around for many years before the iPhone was more than a dream in Jobs' head. It's only recently that smartphones have actually become usable and not just frustrating toys. What are these orders of magnitude you speak of on the desktop side? I don't frequently find myself wishing OS X did much differently.
  - Qz 17y ago
    The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's better than it was, but it's still pretty terrible and a lot of that has to do with its legacy. For iPhone they really sat down and thought, what actually works on a smartphone? This took a long damn time as far as I'm concerned. I have a motorola phone from 2008 and the interface is godawful and makes me want to tear things apart every time I have to navigate its unwieldly menu system. My previous phone was from 2004 -- there was almost no improvement from one to the next. As for the desktop, a lot of where I see potential is in interactivity between programs. Pretty much any time there is interactivity between programs these days it's because the application developers programmed it in, and I think there's a huge opportunity to weave application interactivity into the desktop shell itself, so that things Just Work, without everyone having to code that stuff up all the time. There's also, in my experience, a crapload of user time wasted doing menial things like window management that doesn't need to happen. Those are just a few things -- don't want to give away all my ideas...
    - ericd 17y ago
      Right, but how do you see that happening with desktop OS's? Their limitations were already largely thought through at Xerox PARC decades ago, and that's how the mouse and windowing systems were born - they're very good methods of dealing with the limited screen real estate. If anything, there are less limitations on them now. Touch tablets are potentially an area for expansion, but I don't know that I've seen anything that warrants a radical change on the desktop. As for the menial tasks, I do next to no window management - my screens are completely unorganized, but a combination of Expose, alt-tab/tilde, and Quicksilver tend to make that a nonissue.

what 17y ago

> Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. What makes drag and drop more usable than the browser's file selector dialog? Using your example: For drag and drop you would have to minimize the browser to see the zillion files, scan the icons that are in some random order to find the file and then drag it to your browser. With the file selector it's a few clicks to get an organized list, a flick of the scroll wheel and a double click to open. I'm not convinced that drag and drop is any easier or more convenient, it actually seems like more effort.

Qz 17y ago
The zillion file person was a hypothetical, but I'll give you a real world example: I use two monitors, and I tend to arrange files I'm working with into groups on the two desktops. I have the browser open in one window, and since I know what the groups are (and they're arranged to not overlap with my browser window), finding a particular file that I would want to drag to imageshack takes a fraction of a second, drag and dropping would take another second max. Finding the file in the browser dialog ignores all the grouping and placement I have done on the desktop and just sorts things by filename. It takes significantly longer for me to find files with that dialog than the 1.5 seconds to drag a file to firefox.
- what 17y ago
  Fair enough. If you've taken the time to organize the icons, you probably know where everything is. But when I think of some one with a zillion files on their desktop, I picture a disorganized jumble of icons. Plus the second monitor probably helps. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
  - Qz 17y ago
    I mean, it's probably not very helpful on a netbook with a 1024x600 screen, but I still think its worth it on your average desktop flatscreen.