Introducing CoreDragon: cross-application drag’n’drop for iPad

I am very passionate about user experience design with direct manipulation. With the advent of multitouch, we have freed ourselves of the computer mouse, and the disconnected interaction of hand movement from cursor movement. Being able to directly touch what we interact with is a great victory, and the major reason why iOS is such an intuitive platform. However, in the design of the iPad, Apple has retained many of the design decisions that were made for a tiny mobile phone, where one can only do one thing at a time. This leads to a lot of modal interactions and sequences of single finger taps, such as the activity view controller, where the entire application is blocked by a modal interaction that you complete by tapping through tedious steps.

The eighties solved this with another piece of direct manipulation: drag and drop. Today, I bring the eighties right back into 2016 with my new open source library CoreDragon. CoreDragon lets you get rid of context menus, modal interactions and even copy paste, by allowing you to mark some areas of your application as things that can be dragged; and other areas as places where you can drop things.

See the video above or at lookback.io for a full demo with two sample apps.