Inventions on Drag and Drop in GUI

Drag and drop operation is one of the key capabilities of any Graphical User Interface. The user can do quite complex operations simply by visually dragging and dropping objects from one location to another. It saves user from remembering and typing a lot of commands. The result of a drag and drop operation may vary depending the type of source object and type of destination object. For example dragging a file and dropping on a folder may copy or move the file to the destination folder, dropping that file to a remote ftp location may upload that file using internet, dropping that file on a printer icon may print that file, dropping that file on the trash can may delete that file, and dropping that file on an executable may play or open or compute or manipulate that file. Thus a drag and drop operation although prima facie seems to be a simple operation, it can become extremely complicated depending on the type of objects dragged and the type of destination objects selected for dropping. The difficulties of a drag and drop operation may be summarized as follows. ⇛ Dragging and dropping tiny objects may require precise mouse movements, which requires a lot of practice. Dragging an undesirable object by slip of finger may yield undesirable result. Similarly, if the finger is slipped form the mouse while dragging, the object may be dropped elsewhere thereby causing an undesirable result. ⇛ The drag and drop operation requires both the source window/ container and destination window / container to be visible on the screen. If the destination container / window is not visible on the screen, it is either not possible or requires complex operations to drop the object on the destination container. ⇛ Scrolling the screen while dragging to reach the desired location is a difficult operation as the same pointer devise is to be used for both dragging and scrolling operations simultaneously. ⇛ The result of a drag and drop operation can be one of the many permutations and combinations depending on the nature and type of source and destination object. For example, while dragging a file icon from one folder to another folder of the same disk the file is moved, but while dragging the same to a folder of another disk, the file is only copied and not moved. Thus there are many drawbacks of a conventional drag …