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Anarchie's Drag Scrolling

Anarchie is a Macintosh FTP client application that implements FTP in a very Finder-like fashion. The following is a picture of an Anarchie listing window.

Anarchie Listing Window

Originally these windows were implemented as simple lists but then, with the advent of the Drag Manager, they were revised to let you drag items out of list windows to the Finder. FTP done the right way!

Unfortunately this lead to a problem, which was that I'd got very used to drag scrolling in the list windows. Drag scrolling is the mechanism whereby you drag a selection in a window and, when you drag the pointer outside of the windows bounds, the window scrolls so that the selection can continue to grow. Drag scrolling is useful, not just for selecting stuff, but also because it allows you to scroll a window without having to mess around with fiddly scroll bars.

When Anarchie was revised to support dragging to the Finder, the drag scrolling functionality was lost. This aggrieved me so much that I got together with the author (Peter N Lewis) to develop a solution. The solution was to make only the icons and their associated text as drag sources in listing windows. The blank parts of the listing window are available for drag scrolling. The pointer changes to reflect this. When it is over the drag scrolling area, it turns into a big cross (as shown in the above diagram), but when it is over the icon or the file name, it changes into a standard pointer.


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Quinn "The Eskimo!"
13 Feb 1998