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Comment by dazbradbury | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, what I meant to say isn't this simply equivalent to copy and paste?

In windows at least: http://superuser.com/a/252104

I can think of only a few scenarios where dropping is the only option and pasting isn't available - but clearly those scenarios were real pain points for people!

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This is about extending the existing graphical UI design. Direct manipulation of graphical elements is preferred on a Mac. Think about touch on iOS devices to get a sense of how important direct manipulation is to Apple. (And how the iPhone did not have copy/paste at all when it first shipped.)

So, yes, they are equivalent (in certain situations, drag and drop can be a move or whatever else is appropriate). But copy/paste is the alternative. So is cp at a Terminal command line.

On mac I use Clipmenu[1]. While dragondrop is certainly intuitive and clever, I personally dislike the move away from keyboard interaction. Of course we super-users (not my mother) can be more productive with 102 interactionspoints than we can wit 2.

Any ways - congrats; but not for me :-)

[1]: http://www.clipmenu.com/

An alternative use-case would be when using a program such as Adobe Photoshop, rather than launching Photoshop, clicking File, open, navigating to your desired directory, selecting which files to open the pressing open; if you already have the directory open, drag the files onto the Photoshop icon and it'll open them.

Thanks. After reading the other comments, it's apparent Apple users simply drag and drop a lot more. I think there a many more common use cases for dragging and dropping than on Windows - perhaps from the days of designing for single mouse button user experience.

Anyway, extremely interesting to see, so thanks for not all downvoting my ignorance immediately!

Well done as well to the OP for battling and getting his app released. Seems as though the hard work is paying off!

Drag and drop may or may not be equivalent to copy/paste. In case of Windows Explorer, their behavior is the same but it could be different for other applications.

E.g. let's say you have a word document, if you drag and drop it on an open Word window, it will open it. You can't do copy/paste to open the document. If you have an FTP client with drag and drop support, you can drop a file to upload it to the FTP server. In general, a program can attach its own meaning to drag and drop which could be different from copy/paste.

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