PROBLEM:
Everyone who uses any kind of web e-email application knows this problem. You want to select a subset of items in your inbox, but 'select all' is just not enough. Moreover, the thought of individually clicking a bunch of little checkboxes makes your eyes glaze.
SOLUTION:
An implementation
of the well-known "rubber band tool" that is in virtually every major GUI platform out there. If you use MSFT Windows, you can understand what I mean simply by going to 'windows explorer' and drag the mouse over some files.
I would like to have a way to do *exactly* the same thing in Web Apps that you can do in 'windows explorer'
RATIONALE:
This is a very simple idea, but so far I have never seen a web application that allows you to do something like this, as they almost always tend to employ a 'checkbox' strategy with the ability to 'select all' or 'select none'.
ALTERNATIVES:
There are some alternative approaches that make checkboxes less tedious (such as combining 'tags' or 'keywords' or 'labels' to items, and allowing a user to apply 'select all' to an arbitrary subset based on keywords. The drawback of this alternative is that it ordinarily does not allow the user to combine multiple subsets.
(UPDATE: posting is shorter and took out CTRL key reference).