Dragging My Way To The Bank.

While maybe not as important as listeners, dragging and dropping is an action we all know and love. Remember your bewilderment the first time you dragged a chunk of a spreadsheet into your word processor and watched as a neat little table was constructed before your eyes? Do you not sometimes open up a bunch of unrelated programs and try to drag objects from one to the other in hopes that the little icon with the + sign on it will replace your mouse cursor as if to say, “Yes, you are welcomed here my friend…”? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we can experience this delightful sensation more often? I certainly think so.

Snapping back to reality, our next task is to come up with a second demo that allows users to connect boxes together via multiple input/output points. As well, users can insert different types of boxes into the main canvas by dragging and dropping from a toolbar. There’s a lot more to it, but I’ll save that discussion for when we have completed more of the demo.

Even though the first demo did everything we wanted it to, I was still feeling a bit uneasy about advanced uses of listeners. Moreover, I needed to learn how to implement drag and drop. After researching a bit about dragging and dropping, things are fuzzy when I try to visualize how all the handler functions work together. Smartly, I decided to write a simple application to help me see it all in action…

OK, now phasing back into dreamland.

We are all drag and drop fanatics. However, most of us don’t get the chance to do it often enough. So perhaps if we can integrate drag and drop with some of our more common computing tasks, we can rely on and appreciate dragging and dropping even more. This is the need I set out to satisfy with my newest software innovation:

Click here to experience the latest breakthrough in HCI and productivity. (but it may take a while to load because UT’s webspace isn’t exactly optimized for serving webpages or handle web requests in general)

I think I will start calling up Microsoft about buying me out with some of that yummy Yahoo money… I don’t think they will want to risk dealing with a potential threat to their multi-billion dollar cash cow. Now the question is, how many zeroes do I want on my cheque? … Wish me luck!