Membranophonist’s Ramblings

With 10.4, Apple has implemented some support for creating documents by dropping content on applications that can handle it. Progress, Marc!

The Good

Users can now drop objects (text, links, etc.) onto the Dock icons of some applications that can handle the particular object. For example, dragging a syndication feed link from Safari 2.0 to NetNewsWire 2.0’s Dock icon will add the feed to your subscriptions.

The Bad

• Though possible in some applications (MacJournal and TextEdit work), image drag-and-drop to the Dock is not logically implemented. If I drag an image from a browser window to TextEdit, I want the image in a document, not the URL of the image. Furthermore, the image’s link text is placed in a plain text document even if the user’s default document type is RTF.

  Update:

  Drag-and-drop of images from Safari 2.0 to Preview works exactly as I envisioned it. I guess it is just a matter of other browsers supporting the Dock’s new drag-and-drop features.

• Dragging objects to Mail’s Dock icon while Mail is not running opens the application, but doesn’t create a new message with the dragged object.
• Dropping white text on TextEdit creates a document with a white background, making the text invisible. The new TextEdit RTF document should have the same background color as the document from which the text comes. I imagine determining the background color of the source document could be difficult, but Alan Cooper says programmers like challenges! :-)

The Ugly

Do not try dragging anything from OmniWeb 5 unless you are prepared to kill all your running applications and log out. A fellow NetNewsWire beta tester reports it working fine, but another has run into the same problem I’ve encountered on the two machines I’ve tested it on. This is a particularly nasty bug of which I have already informed the OmniGroup.

6/15/05 Update: OmniWeb 5.1.1b2 fixes the bug that caused the Dock and OW to crash when attempting to drag-and-drop to another application’s Dock icon.