iTunes gets springy
February 25th, 2004
A new concept, complete with PDF walkthrough. This is basically applying the capabilities of the 10.3 Finder’s sidebar and column view to iTunes to provide another drag-and-drop navigation option.
Pervasive Spring-loading in iTunes (PDF, 1.9MB)
Funky For You from the album Like Water For Chocolate by Common
Yep, there’s another one I’ve got to agree with! : )
BTW At a much more basic level, iTunes needs to accept drag-and-drop between it’s info fields, that’s bloody frustrating at the moment.
To your main point, I’d concur that ‘Drag-and-Drop’ coupled with ‘Spring-Loading’ could be much more pervasive, and provide a great deal of contextually-relevant, discoverable interaction and feedback; dragging text onto an object would route to areas/contexts within which the receiving object can accept the dragged text, likewise for images (as you’ve done here, with your iTunes suggestion.)
Now that we have the power of Expose, allowing us to ‘fluidly’ shift through our desktop context, I find time and again that I want to grab a file object, or a selection within a file, ‘whiz’ to an appropriate window, or dock icon, etc., and have the item inserted, or interacting with the app in some appropriate way.
Hopefully these opportunities will be extended in further iterations of the OS.
Along the lines of your desire for iTunes to allow text drag-and-drop within its Info window, the Address Book should treat field items as objects that can be drag-and-dropped from one card to another (with spring-loaded group navigation, of course :-)) while the app is in Edit mode.
I really hope to see Apple extend Exposé to work more seamlessly with drag-and-drop. The current features are solid, but it is still largely designed as a window selection interface. My ego and I would sure like it if they implement some of my ideas in this area. Only about three weeks until 10.4 is previewed, so we’ll see…
Yep, with you on all of that… let’s hope that Tiger holds some deeper interface work…