Refine drag and drop Launcher pop-out behaviour

[Paul Sladen]

In various cases, drag and drop is used internally within an application as part of the workflow; for example, in Thunderbird messages can be sorted and filed by dragging them from the main listing to the folder tree structure in the left-hand panel.

A hidden Unity Launcher currently shows whenever a drag-and-drop operation commences, even if the user is unlikely to need it—in the case of Thunderbird this also covers up the folder list.

There may be some possible ways to refine this:

  (a) showing the Launcher only a few pixels until the mouse advances within the bounds of the fully-shown Launcher bounding box.
  (b) using a combination of blur/fading (like the status notifications) if the uses hovers over the Launcher without dropping.
  (c) many other possibilities.

Hopefully (using the Thunderbird example in particular) it may be possible to find a refined design.