
Gmail Adds Drag-and-Drop Saving for Attachments - Concours
http://lifehacker.com/5604114/gmail-adds-drag+and+drop-saving-for-attachments?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lifehacker%2Ffull+%28Lifehacker%29
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jessriedel
Gmail has been adding simple, non-novel features like this pretty regularly
for years (e.g. signatures with full text styles, undo send email, multiple
inboxes on one page). I can't imagine that the bottleneck on rolling these out
is developer time, so what is it? Customer research/feedback to find out what
features are really needed without bloating?

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patrickaljord
In this case, dragging and dropping files out of the browser needs to be
supported by the browser. In this case Chrome and a standard needs to be
defined to do so.

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thought_alarm
GMail has supported this for a while now in WebKit browsers. And by the way,
the Safari file widget has always supported drag-and-drop. Very handy.

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Timothee
Was it to save attachments though? I remember the ability to _add_ attachments
to an email but I think you misunderstood the title.

I thought the same thing as you did (I upvoted you even), but the article
talks about the other way around: saving attachments to your desktop by drag-
and-drop. The post says the file is added to the download queue but is just
saved wherever you designated instead of the Downloads folder.

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thought_alarm
You're right, I didn't catch that.

It strikes me as a very impossible-to-discover feature.

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spoondan
Dragging and dropping files is an interaction that people already know. Nobody
needs to "discover" it, they just need to assume it works.

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thought_alarm
That's precisely the problem. People routinely drag links and images from a
browser window to their desktop; it's a feature as old as Netscape Navigator.
I would never expect or assume that the image or link I'm dragging to the
desktop would act as a proxy to an entirely different document.

