[jotaen]

This looks like an interesting concept!

> I find that the drag and drop experience can quickly become a nightmare, especially on mobile.

To me, drag and drop is only a nightmare on mobile. On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well.

Your design experiment reminds me of a recent talk of Scott Jenson, where he talked about how we just took over established UX patterns from desktop to mobile as is, and how that created all sorts of nuisances. (https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?t=1565)

If mobile drag&drop was implemented like you are suggesting from the very start, I actually might have preferred that over the situation we now ended up with.

One technical note on your implementation: on certain mobile browsers, there is a glitch where the UI can jump around as the browser dynamically slides top or bottom menu bars in and out.

[killerstorm]

> On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well.

Strong disagree here. It is intuitive, it is easy to demonstrate. But it's not really convenient, especially on a trackpad. I have enough mouse agility to play RTS games but not to do a reliable drag-and-drop, especially in a complicated case - across windows, with scroll, etc.

[jrowen]

Yes, it can get tricky if you have to scroll a bunch, e.g. moving a file in a big directory into a subfolder, trying to hit that one pixel where it will scroll up, or using two other fingers to attempt to scroll, while holding the drag finger down...(CLI pros, you win this one).

I would like a desktop pick and place that works like drag and drop, you click and then it sticks to the cursor, but you are free to do whatever gestures until you click again.

[jotaen]

On macOS, I find “3 finger drag” very convenient to use, and for me it works a lot better than “press and hold”. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102341) It even allows you to briefly lift your fingers to reposition them on the trackpad without stopping the drag action.

[RHSeeger]

> But it's not really convenient, especially on a trackpad

From my experience, there's nothing convenient about a trackpad; pretty much ever. About the only thing they do better than a normal mouse is scrolling left/right, and that's only marginally. I bring a mouse with me when I take my laptop somewhere because I hate the trackpad so much.

[yencabulator]

There are few things worse than a WIMP UI, touchpad, drag-and-drop with tiny targets, no clear visual feedback on what you actually did, and no undo.

[csomar]

> On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well.

I have a feeling it makes RSI worse.