TUAW Tip: Drag and drop with Expos&eacute;

Drag and drop is one of the many wonders of graphical user interfaces, exponentially increasing productivity with an intuitive, common-sense approach that leaves you with a reaffirmed belief in the unquestionable brilliance of mankind. Exposé takes that to a whole new level: You can actually navigate Exposé while dragging a file/item, allowing you to easily locate and drop it into The Right Window.

Example: You're surfin' in Safari when you run across an image of Bob the Builder that would work perfectly as a title slide in your "Timmy's First Halloween!" home movie project in iMovie. But iMovie is buried behind iCal, Mail, and that Word doc of your thesis you've had open for five years designed to remind you that "one day...[you'll] get it to one day." What are your options? Well, you could save the image to the desktop, pop into iMovie, then import it that way. Or save it to iPhoto, and use the Media Browser to locate and load it in. Both options require extraneous and tedious steps, as well as an extra file you'll almost certainly never need again.

Instead, you could do this: Grab the image and, without releasing the mouse button, load Exposé (F9 is the default). Drag the item over the iMovie window and wait a few seconds (or hit spacebar) -- then pop the image into one of iMovie's media boxes, where it will be automatically imported into your project. The same kind of thing works for all sorts of items: Dragging files between Finder windows, text from one app to another, URLs across browsers, etc.

Cool, huh?

Update: Some readers made a great point, something I should've originally mentioned: Instead of having to use a second hand to hit the F9 key, just set an Exposé hotcorner and perform the drag-and-drop with nothing more than a swift motion of the mouse. I have my bottom-left corner set up for Exposé's All Windows option, and it's great for drag-and-drop scenarios. (Thanks Chadster and Rolphus.)

View Tags

Categories

Productivity Tips and tricks TUAW Tips

Drag and drop is one of the many wonders of graphical user interfaces, exponentially increasing productivity with an...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

19 Comments

Filter by:

Phosphor

First off...it's a dang shame we can't grab images from a web browser window and drop them onto an open Photoshop document. But then again, we can't drag and drop unopened image files from anywhere else onto an open Photoshop window and have them create a new layer, so I'm not horribly disappointed by the fact that Expos頤oesn't magically enable this behavior. Cool tip, overall though. I'm sure I'll find a lot of uses for it.

And secondly...NO, not everyone has their lower-left monitor corner set to show all windows.

I have the lower-right set as an Expos頨otspot for showing all windows. I've set the lower left-corner as a hotspot for Expos頴o show my desktop. I have my dock anchored to the bottom-left, and I have my Finder icon positioned on the far left side of my dock. This way, in one fairly smooth motion I can move all open windows offscreen, then with a very small movement my cursor is over top of the Finder icon, where I can click to open a new Finder window.

February 01 2006 at 6:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ashley Easter

I agree - bottom left for all windows, bottom right for the desktop. However, I have a legacy thing with my screensaver to the top left corner (hanging around from mac os 8 or 9 days) and thus have dashboard in the top right corner. I agree though, for me it's often better to command-tab my way about apps when dragging stuff around, but that may be because I'm always trackpadding it on my PowerBook.

Yes, that's sadly a PowerBook. Not a MacBook, despite the stupid name.

February 01 2006 at 4:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

holophile

Expose was nice until I realized it's a lot easier to Cmd-Tab to the destination app while click-dragging. This is comes in handy on the crowded keyboard of a powerbook.

February 01 2006 at 1:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dan Bedford

Wow, does everyone set the All Windows hot corner to the bottom left? I have mine set to the bottom left as well, along with the desktop in the bottom right, and Dashboard in the top-left (and at work I have the top-right set to the password protected screen saver to lock my computer when I leave my desk).

I swear, all of my friends and a few people here at work that I showed the hot corners/Expose trick have All Windows set to the bottom left.

Crazy!! haha

February 01 2006 at 1:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Thomas

I tried to explain this technique to my brother ages ago (it's something I picked up on my own, my brain kinda assumed that's how drag and drop should work so never assumed it was something novel to some people) and he just couldn't grasp it, I think it was too simple and obvious.

February 01 2006 at 1:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Adrian

In most cases you will propably get the same result by dragging the file to the application's icon in the dock, since you cannot drop the file to a specific target inside of a window (without switching out of expos鬠which should work fine too).
I use this more frequently in combination with F11. Instead of loading a file from the desktop using the open dialog, you can press F11, start dragging your file, press F11 again and drop it.

February 01 2006 at 12:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Wysiwyg

Things like that make me love my iBook in home, and makes me scream in pain and anger when i have to work with Windows in my job.

Goddamnit, i hate those beige boxes.

February 01 2006 at 12:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

wheels

Very sweet. OSX never fails to astonish me.

February 01 2006 at 12:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mike

All the time I've wasted reading TUAW just paid a dividend!

February 01 2006 at 11:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Stacey

Now, that is sweet.....

February 01 2006 at 11:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply