Drag and drop should be a standard

[finale00]

I think drag and drop should be supported by any GUI application.
Any application that requires you to "choose a file" should support drag and drop.

Some applications are designed so that not only do you not have a BUTTON that you can click on to choose a file, but they force you to select a menubar to choose a menu option that prompts you to choose a file.

What are some things that every GUI application should have?

[Mr.Mouse]

Drag and drop really doesn't need to be with all GUI, it depends on the purpose of the tool. Why would you want it?

What are some things that every GUI application should have?

1. A quit button.
2. Check file existing if trying to save work and warn the user. (I sometimes come across tools that don't do this. What a load of crap after you suddenly realize you clicked "save" instead of "load" in otherwise similar dialogs)
3. Clearly separated Load and Save buttons, if needed
4. A decent file manager dialog

Just some things, there are many more

[spont]

What I'd like... from a utopian perspective...

1. A quit button. :D

I'd like a system-wide option to disable the "do you really REALLY want to quit?" dialogs when there is no unsaved data. Or better still - since storage is cheap - backup any unsaved data automatically and quit. I.e. automatically store application state which can be resumed, bookmarked or reset.

2. Check file existing if trying to save work and warn the user. (I sometimes come across tools that don't do this. What a load of crap after you suddenly realize you clicked "save" instead of "load" in otherwise similar dialogs)

Revision Control at the file-system level would let you recover from that situation.

4. A decent file manager dialog

I'd like to get rid of files altogether, and just deal with cross-referenced Data. Any file containing more than one section of Data could legitimately be split into multiple files, so it seems to me that the concept of a file itself is the same as any other archive. It's a convenient work-around, and contributing factor to the problem that your computer will likely have no clue as to the Data inside a file with a wrong three-letter extension.

With the Data-Orientated method you'd first identify the Data, extract it to a database and tag it. Then instead of a file manager dialog you'd have a Data Search dialog, where the original filename is just one searchable parameter. If the Data is part of a larger set (e.g. a palette paired with an image), then the dialog would expand to let you select the cross-references.

I can dream :-)

A more achievable compromise in the short-term would be to have the option to impose your favourite file manager dialog on any application.