Reproducing the Interface "Sortable Boxes" demo in UI

Reproducing the Interface "Sortable Boxes" demo in UI


Here's the demo I mean: http://interface.eyecon.ro/demos/sort.html
I'm trying to port this demo into UI, but I'm hitting two issues.
First, the boxes lose their width when I begin dragging, instead of
staying the same size and simply moving with the cursor. Second, there
doesn't seem to be an intuitive way to allow sorting containers to
accept each other's children -- in that demo, there are three lists,
and the user can drag any box into any list at any position. With UI
sortables, boxes can only be dragged around their original parent.
Obviously I could write a hack that caught the drop events and tried
to clone the box into the new parent, but is there a more elegant
solution?