Drag and Drop

     Drag and Drop, in one form or another, has been a part of the Macintosh experience from the beginning.  It is an essential part of any graphic user interface (GUI), as it allows any user to manipulate objects directly.  With each major change in the system software, Apple has refined and re-defined the meaning of drag and drop.

A Little History

     For System 6 users, and most of the systems before that, drag and drop simply meant dragging an object or folder onto another folder.  This process moved the dragged object into the folder to which it was dragged.  Dragging an object to a disk or external device copied the object onto the device.

     With System 7.0, Apple added new features to drag and drop.  Now you could drag a document directly to an applications icon to open it.  You could also drag documents that were not created by the application to it and, if the application could translate the document, it would open the document and translate it for you.  To make it easy to tell if the application could open the document, the application's icon would highlight as the document was dragged over the icon telling you that it could open it.  This feature, combined with another new feature of System 7 called aliases, allowed users to create drag and drop launchers for their desktops with little or no effort.

     Apple's newest version of drag and drop, seen in System 7.5, is light years ahead of anything seen previously.  Not only does it affect objects in the Finder, now it has the potential to add powerful features to all of the applications we use.

Bypassing the Clipboard

     Before, editing text required a constant process of copying and pasting to and from the clipboard.  With the new drag and drop, text can be moved easily from one area of a document to another area, or to another document's window, or even to another application's document.

     The process is a simple one.  Just select the text you want to move, grab the text with the arrow cursor, and drag the text to where you want it.  As you are dragging the text, the text cursor will mirror the arrow cursor showing you exactly where your text will be placed.  This new drag and drop is even intelligent enough to know to add spaces before or after the dragged text even if you did not select them.  You can also option-drag an item to copy it instead of move it.

     Dragging to another document is just as easy.  As soon as the selected text is dragged to the window you want it in, the text cursor appears showing you where your text will be placed.  What is really amazing is this process can work with graphics as easily as it does with text.  Any format that the clipboard can handle has the potential to be dragged.

Dragging to the Desktop

     Another really cool feature of the new drag and drop is the ability to create clippings.  By dragging text, or any other dragable item, to the desktop, you can create what is called a clippings file.  A clipping is a file that when double-clicked opens a window to show you its contents.

     The fun part is you can drag these clippings to any document's window to place the text or graphic in that document.  Save a block of text you use frequently on you desktop for easy dragging to your documents.  Save a PICT of you company logo for easy dragging to official reports.  The possibilities are endless.  I use clippings to copy Internet addresses from text that I find to the desktop for later dragging to Netscape.  I have even seen desktop patterns distributed online in clipping format for dragging to Apple's new control panel Desktop Patterns.  No need to translate the patterns.  No need to even open another application to load them, just drag and drop.

The Bad News

     For those wanting to jump right in and start dragging everything in sight, there is some bad news.  To access these new features, programmers have to re-write their applications.  And, unfortunately, the process has been a slow one.  I think I have seen more shareware programs that support the new drag and drop than I have commercial ones.  This is not a new problem.  Many of Apple's new gee-whiz features have been slow to be adopted, but programmers usually come around.

Having Fun Now

     If you want to see drag and drop work, all that is needed is System 7.5 or later.  Most of the utilities that Apple includes with System 7.5 (i.e. the Scrapbook, Notepad, SimpleText, etc.) work with drag and drop.

     Make sure you test your favorite programs to see if they are drag and drop aware.  Using this new feature of the MacOS can greatly speed up tedious editing chores - and is a whole lot of fun too.