Open Radar

 
Instead of using context menus, modal view controllers, share sheets and other "indirect manipulation" ways of moving data around, it's much more intuitive to just grab the thing you want to move, and drop it on the place where you want to move it to. Drag’n’drop is a widely used feature in Mac OS, and is especially powerful as an inter-app data sharing tool. With multitouch, and especially two-handed multitouch, drag’n’drop can be even more powerful than with a mouse, as you can navigate and drag content at the same time.

With iOS 9 multitasking, it’s painful to sit on some data in the leftmost app, and have no direct way to transfer it to the rightmost app, except through a five-tap copy-paste gesture, or possibly an activity sheet that will force me to navigate to the same place as the one I already have open, but in a popover.

To give you some inspiration, I have built an open-source library for intra- and inter-app drag’n’drop with APIs inspired by Mac OS, but extended in a way that works well with view controllers.

Video: https://lookback.io/watch/WfaXvq8vgWGPNYmxJ
Source: https://github.com/nevyn/CoreDragon

I’m not a fan of the long-press gesture. I would probably rather have a universal “drag handle” area on each draggable object, to indicate that it can be moved. This way, the user would not have to sit there and wait for the UI to react. Additionally, most UI components where this feature would be useful already have some sort of “…” context menu button or similar, which could be replaced once all its context actions can be performed as drag’n’drop actions instead.