Although the slide-back issue is mentioned in both the blog post and the comments of the demo app (in DragQueenDemoView.m), you’re absolutely right that, in the case of NSTableView or NSOutlineView, you’d need to subclass and override -dragImage:at:offset:event:pasteboard:source:slideBack: to achieve the same affect. This is more or less what I did in XTabulator 2 and it works beautifully.

Thanks for writing.

One note about using it with NSTableView/NSOutlineView: these classes never call mouseDragged:, so you will need to disable Cocoa’s “slideBack” feature by adding the following code to the table view subclass. Otherwise Cocoa will slide back the invisible 1×1 drag image, and since -draggedImage:endedAt:operation: doesn’t get called until *after* the drag operation is finished, this normally adds a noticeable delay between releasing the mouse and JLNDragEffectManager’s own “slide back” animation.