More Drag-and-Drop Creation

April 14th, 2007
Categories: Interaction, OS X

I want to add contact information for a person I’ve come across to my address book.

  1. Select

  2. Drag and Drop

  3. Review and/or Save

The same steps would work for event text blocks dragged to calendar applications.

How would this magic happen? Bring back Apple Data Detectors!

I’m fully aware of microformats and have mocked up of how they could be used to provide similar functionality in Flock. This is a more generalized method that would work with semantically undefined text in any application.

3 Responses to “More Drag-and-Drop Creation”

  1. Hans, on April 14th, 2007 at 2:54 PM Said:

    Bring back Apple Data Detectors!
    Hear, hear!

    Microformats should allow publishers to explicitly declare structure, not be our only hope of discerning it.

  2. John, on April 14th, 2007 at 4:21 PM Said:

    Daniel,

    I have long admired your design and UI ideas and your proposed solutions. I’m curious, do you submit these to Apple? I have submitted some of your ideas to Apple in the past, siting you as the author.

    Thanks,

    -John

  3. akatsuki, on April 14th, 2007 at 4:57 PM Said:

    I have been arguing that microformats are essentially a dead-end format for basics like contact info and calendar info. Contextual data detection is far superior in daily practice. I would love it if Apple would implement at least plain sentence parsing in iCal and Address Book instead of the nightmare of entry boxes that iCal has especially.

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