The Little Things: Drag and drop

TUAW reader Chris Roberts was right: it's been far too long since our last post in The Little Things series, so I figured I'd pick up the slack with a really handy feature of Mac OS X: drag and drop. Sure, most OSes these days can drag and drop at least some things, but Apple has gone to great lengths to build this workflow-enhancing feature into so many facets of Mac OS X's experience, I don't really have time to cover them all (and there's no doubt that I don't even know about them all). Take my screenshot for example: I'm dragging an image of our puppy out of iPhoto on the left into iChat's icon well on the right. A simple gesture, sure, but a tiny example of how powerful this functionality can become. Try a few of these other drag and drop operations on for size:

Drag a file onto an app's icon in the Finder or Dock; its icon should darken, signifying that it can handle whatever you're throwing at it. Hold the Command key to force an app to open a file if it isn't initially cooperating.
Drag images from a browser (except Firefox and Camino) into a Mail message or iChat window to easily share them; no clunky 'right-click, Save, Open' workflows here.
Pause a QuickTime movie, click on the video and drag out to the desktop to create an instant snapshot of the frame you paused on (this might only work in QuickTime Pro - can anyone verify?).
Drag a file onto a Terminal window to instantly create a path.
Highlight text in most apps, then click and drag it to the desktop to create a text snippet, or into another window (Mail, iChat and Yojimbo are great examples) for a drag 'n drop take on copy/paste.

I'm sure there's a ton more where this came from, so try it on for size or stay tuned to the comments on this post where readers can share their own tricks and tips for dragging and dropping one's way to productive bliss.

View Tags

Categories

OS Software Tips and tricks

TUAW reader Chris Roberts was right: it's been far too long since our last post in The Little Things series, so I figured I'd pick up the...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

16 Comments

Filter by:

(01)

I have to say, I've really been appreciating how drag & drop of text is handled in OS X. The intuitive copy, not cut of the text is handled is great, as opposed to windows, which I've been using at work lately. I do a lot online academic research, at this annoyance makes me have to copy and paste text back into a field that I dragged text out of. I guess it's like they say, it's the little things... :-)

April 15 2007 at 10:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon

If you're previewing an image in Preview, you can drag the icon from the centre of the title bar onto the Photoshop icon in the dock, and it will open in Photoshop for editing purposes - despite the image still being open in Preview. Discovered that one completely by accident - one of those Mac things that just makes you smile at the wonderfulness of it all...

April 15 2007 at 5:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jason

You can drag pictures out of Camino....

April 15 2007 at 3:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Macskeeball

Use drag and drop with ExposÃ©.

April 15 2007 at 1:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Max

In any open or save dialog box, drag and drop a file or folder onto it to immediately take you to that file or folder in the little file browser thing.

April 15 2007 at 12:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kevin Marsh

Quicksilver handles dragging and dropping pretty nicely as well. If you invoke Quicksilver, start typing the name of an app so its icon appears, it becomes a drop target just like the Dock that you can drop files onto.

April 15 2007 at 11:57 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mark Benson

One thing that *doesn't* work well in OS X is dragging and dropping rtext between fields in web forms in Safari. I dunno what possessed Apple to screw this up, it works fine in FireFox and the lack of said functionality drives me bananas.

April 15 2007 at 11:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

hessi

in every (cocoa?) program, drag the icon of the file you're working with from the title bar to a folder, a mail, ... to save a copy, send it or do whatever you like.

April 15 2007 at 10:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

To save image from websites, just drag and drop it onto Desktop or your preferred folder. No 3,4 steps workflow needed.

April 15 2007 at 9:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Adrian Bool

Great suggestion Jif - hitting f11 mid drag was a pain.

As an ex Acorn RiscOS user I suffer from not being able to use drag as much as I could in the old days. Drag and drop was the way of saving files in RiscOS - it would be wonderful if that worked in OSX rather than having to use the cumbersome Save As dialog... Why aren't the file icons in the tops of document applications draggable when they are first opened!? Grrr.

April 15 2007 at 9:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply