nisus.com

I'm glad drag and drop works for you now! I wish there was a way to adjust it but there not any such option.

The issue of the drag delay has been hotly debated by developers inside and outside Apple for years now, BTW. The issue is that too short a delay is a problem for inexperienced users because they will suddenly find their text floating and moving around when they only wanted to change the selection. On the other hand, having a delay violates the expectations of experienced users.

Ignoring the issue of users having to relearn old habits, I think having some delay is the more "correct" thing to do because making it too easy to invoke drag and drop editing can make the environment feel "unsafe" which is far worse than having to pause for a half second or so before you start to drag.

-Charles

I'm confused. Why DOESN'T the cursor change to a pointer (or better yet, a hand) when hovering over selected text in NWX? Wouldn't this simple feature addition have made "drag and drop" that much more intuitive?

That's indeed the way "most" Mac OS X apps work (by "most" I mean "Cocoa apps", or "those apps that usually are most Mac-like and are made by companies such as Nisus and the Omni Group"). It's also the way suggested by Apple's Interface Guidelines for developers.

This is also why the I-beam doesn't change to a pointer. Doesn't happen in any Cocoa app (that I know of). And, in my humblest of opinions, it oughtn't.

Microsoft programs (the aging IE, the kludgy Word, and the atrocious Excel, for example) just kinda say "screw off" to the Macintosh guidelines. Their file formats aren't the only thing that's proprietary, the very way you work with your computer becomes incompatible with other software. Relatively annoying, no?

i'm not sure i'm following you ryan, but i get the gist. btw i don't touch microsoft app's with a ten foot pole. i got used to the nice helpful i-beam-changes-to-cursor behavior from other mac apps such as eudora.

Just to clarify one thing: I think I was responding to a post on the first page, and not the one immediately preceding mine. Whoops! So, I wasn't saying the pointer does change in most Cocoa programs, because that would be wrong. Sorry for the confusion.

And my rants about Microsoft aren't always that intelligible, sorry if that tripped anyone up.