scott wrote:

> What I really miss in Windows which was the norm on the Acorn GUI was to 
> be able to drag-n-drop to *save* a file from an application.  Quite 
> often I find myself having the explorer window open of some folder deep 
> on our network drive and I want to save my document in there.  On the 
> Acorn you could just click save and drag the file icon to the explorer 
> window, but on Windows you have to navigate in the save dialog to the 
> folder, copy&paste the path name into the save box, or save to the 
> desktop and then move it in explorer.

Mmm, that would, in fact, be rather useful...

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"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > I saw a demo of a drag-and-drop idea I've been lusting after ever since.
>
> What I really miss in Windows which was the norm on the Acorn GUI was to be
> able to drag-n-drop to *save* a file from an application.  Quite often I
> find myself having the explorer window open of some folder deep on our
> network drive and I want to save my document in there.  On the Acorn you
> could just click save and drag the file icon to the explorer window, but on
> Windows you have to navigate in the save dialog to the folder, copy&paste
> the path name into the save box, or save to the desktop and then move it in
> explorer.

You could even 'save' the file in this manner into another open application. For
example, a graph program would save a standard vector-graphics file, but if you
wanted to use the graph directly you'd just 'save' it staight into your
document processor window and it would be inserted at the caret.

In fact, RISCOS's drag-and-drop was standardized and integrated to a degree I've
not seen in any OS GUI since. Any file could be dropped into any filer
window or any application window, or onto the taskbar or the application icon
(obviously it was up to the application to deal with it sensibly - but 99% of
them did). And this was 20 years ago. :)

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> You could even 'save' the file in this manner into another open 
> application. For
> example, a graph program would save a standard vector-graphics file, but 
> if you
> wanted to use the graph directly you'd just 'save' it staight into your
> document processor window and it would be inserted at the caret.

Today it seems that Copy&Paste between applications has replaced this.  I 
use Ctrl-C Ctrl-V the whole time for moving things between applications.

> In fact, RISCOS's drag-and-drop was standardized and integrated to a 
> degree I've
> not seen in any OS GUI since. Any file could be dropped into any filer
> window or any application window, or onto the taskbar or the application 
> icon
> (obviously it was up to the application to deal with it sensibly - but 99% 
> of
> them did). And this was 20 years ago. :)

Yeh it's a shame, there were some good ideas there.

Other things that were nice:

Using Right Mouse Button to select an item from the menu left the menu open 
after doing the command.  This was really useful when you wanted to select 
several menu items in succession, especially if they were nested menus.

When you dragged a scroll-bar the pointer was locked to move only in the 
direction of the scroll bar, this meant you couldn't "slip" off the edge the 
scroll bar and lose the grip.

A window that had gained focus didn't automatically become the top-most 
window.  This was really useful if you are trying to type something into a 
document while looking at something else.  Today I find myself fiddling 
about with resizing and moving windows unnecessarily so I can type while 
seeing some other window.

I'm sure there are other things, I'm going to get my old A3010 from my 
parents attic at xmas to see if it will fire up.  I hope it does, there's 
120MB of retro greatness on it :-D

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Bill Pragnell wrote:

> You could even 'save' the file in this manner into another open application. For
> example, a graph program would save a standard vector-graphics file, but if you
> wanted to use the graph directly you'd just 'save' it staight into your
> document processor window and it would be inserted at the caret.

Well, you can copy and paste data in this way under Windows. E.g., open 
Excel, select a chart, copy, switch to Word, paste the chart.

You will say "that's because Excel and Word are the same product - MS 
Office". But, weirdly, our specialist mass spectrometer control software 
has the exact same feature. And the pasted images show up even if you 
open the Word document on a PC that lacks the mass spec software...

> In fact, RISCOS's drag-and-drop was standardized and integrated to a degree I've
> not seen in any OS GUI since. Any file could be dropped into any filer
> window or any application window, or onto the taskbar or the application icon
> (obviously it was up to the application to deal with it sensibly - but 99% of
> them did). And this was 20 years ago. :)

Ah, the glory days of computing... :-)

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scott wrote:

> A window that had gained focus didn't automatically become the top-most 
> window.  This was really useful.

...isn't that what I said in the first place? ;-)

> I'm sure there are other things, I'm going to get my old A3010 from my 
> parents attic at xmas to see if it will fire up.  I hope it does, 
> there's 120MB of retro greatness on it :-D

Heh. Yeah. I need to retire my A1200 at some point - it's taking up too 
much space, and I hardly ever turn it on. Trouble is, all my synthesizer 
patches are stored on it, and I haven't yet found a PC program that will 
capture MIDI SysEx messages...

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Warp wrote:

>   What really irritates me is Windows Explorer in this regard. For example,
> if I select a directory from the folder view on the left, and the directory
> contents then open on the right, if I try to scroll the file listing, it
> just scrolls the folder view on the left. And the other way around.

I would have sworn I wrote the exact same thing myself a little earlier 
in this thread... ;-)

Annoying, isn't it?

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"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > You could even 'save' the file in this manner into another open
> > application. For
> > example, a graph program would save a standard vector-graphics file, but
> > if you
> > wanted to use the graph directly you'd just 'save' it staight into your
> > document processor window and it would be inserted at the caret.
>
> Today it seems that Copy&Paste between applications has replaced this.  I
> use Ctrl-C Ctrl-V the whole time for moving things between applications.

True. In fact, a system clipboard was something RISCOS lacked, although there
was plenty of freeware that implemented it.

> Using Right Mouse Button to select an item from the menu left the menu open
> after doing the command.  This was really useful when you wanted to select
> several menu items in succession, especially if they were nested menus.

Yep, I hardly ever left-clicked on anything! That extra mouse button was
incredibly useful.

Also: opening a directory viewer with right-double-click would close the parent
directory viewer (obviously not applicable to current filer browsers!)
Similarly, right-click closing a directory viewer would open the parent.
Incredibly useful for quickly navigating directory trees.

> When you dragged a scroll-bar the pointer was locked to move only in the
> direction of the scroll bar, this meant you couldn't "slip" off the edge the
> scroll bar and lose the grip.

One of my favourites was the right-button scroll-bar dragging - if you had both
horizontal and vertical scrollbars in that window you would then be scrolling
both of them at once - 'panning' in fact.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > You could even 'save' the file in this manner into another open application. For
> > example, a graph program would save a standard vector-graphics file, but if you
> > wanted to use the graph directly you'd just 'save' it staight into your
> > document processor window and it would be inserted at the caret.
>
> Well, you can copy and paste data in this way under Windows. E.g., open
> Excel, select a chart, copy, switch to Word, paste the chart.

Windows does have a system clipboard - something that RISCOS lacked. Then again,
it didn't really need it, given the behaviour I described - you could save any
selection in most apps so I guess the question never arose.

Actually, the thing I miss most from RISCOS was its compact and powerful native
vector graphics format. Every relevant application could read and write it; it
was the standard way to move graphics data around. Even today, there is no
standard OS format on any system I've seen that comes close. I'm still appalled
that Word makes do with that dreadful metafile rubbish - I've never got it to
work for me and have always had to fall back on hires pngs rendered from SVG.
Laborious, wasteful and substandard.

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Bill Pragnell wrote:

> Actually, the thing I miss most from RISCOS was its compact and powerful native
> vector graphics format. I'm still appalled
> that Word makes do with that dreadful metafile rubbish - I've never got it to
> work for me and have always had to fall back on hires pngs rendered from SVG.
> Laborious, wasteful and substandard.

What can I say? Word sucks. :-)

PostScript is very powerful, but designed for use on paper. It's also 
rather heavy. (It's a full Turing-complete programming language. It has 
a truckload of features that only a printworks would care about.)

SVG could be nice, but seems unpopular for whatever reason.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> What can I say? Word sucks. :-)

I sympathise - Word definitely used to suck a lot, but it is much better.
However, its inability to handle vector graphics puts it firmly next to the
typewriter for me.

> SVG could be nice, but seems unpopular for whatever reason.

It would be great if Word supported it.

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