Mac DevCenter: palettes or sidebars?

It totally depends on the app. Mail is the perfect place to use the sidebar - a palette would be all wrong for the folder/inbox list. But for apps that offer a lot more things that need to be clicked (MultiAd Creator, Photoshop, etc), palettes is by far the best UI. The user can show only those palettes they need, and position them in any way they want anywhere they want (mine are all on a 2nd monitor). Sticking Photoshop's palette content into a sidebar would be incredibly wrong and impossible to use. So, both UIs have their place.

Handles!
Drawers would have been perfect if the API included handles - little tabs which the programmer could name for each one. This would look like dragthing, and would actually make the drawer useful for hiding/revealling information.

As it stands however, auto-resizing pallettes rule the day. Check out Word 2004, or Mellel. Microsoft liked the behaviour so much they are going to add dynamic pallettes to their Windows version of Office.

I don't quite understand how it can be palettes OR sidebars - surely they have two totally different functions.

As stated in a post above, sidebars are for navigation. For changing properties I really love the Inspector found in Pages/Keynote etc. My only gripe with the current inspector is that the fonts/colors are not well integrated - another box pops up. Also, you can't just go select another element and then the colour box again - the font/colour box is locked to the element which is annoying.

Jamison: that is quite possibly one of the best (albeit probably concise, by Apple's standards) explanations for the use of each of these UI elements. Fantastic.

I do UI design and love this subject. Here's my thinking:

Drawers - They are a perfect real world metaphor for the placement of optional and auxiliary tasks. Mail was an example with mailboxes hidden away in a drawer because for most user time is spent almost exclusively in their inbox. There were usability issues, such as discovery of them (and users "loosing them"), the unpredictability of which side they'd pop out of and and just really bad choices of what to put in drawers (if you can't use the application with the drawer closed, it should be a sidebar) or even multiple drawers (see palettes)

It's a shame the usability of drawers was never addressed and they were just left as is, really since Mac OS X came out.

Sidebars - If the application was pretty much unusable if you close the drawer, then it should be in a sidebar instead. If iPhoto's sidebar was a drawer, you would not be able to switch between your camera and your library. iWeb makes good use of a sidebar to organize web pages.

Since what's critical or not to using an application can be subjective. What's critical to me, might not be to you, which is why this can be contentious with apps like mail. There are usability problems with sidebars just like drawers. Dragging items in, out and around works in quite a lot of different ways and that bug with forgetting column width drives me nuts.

When in doubt though, use a sidebar.

Palettes - Used for tools, while a drawer or sidebar is for navigation. Options in a palette take effect on the main screen, or something you've selected on the main screen (like the fonts palette on whatever text you have selected and the effects palette in iPhoto)

iWeb uses a tools palette to let you choose stuff files from the rest of iLife to add to a web page. If those were options in the sidebar, it would switch from the selected web page to the other program, not let you have them both together.

There can be more than one palette for the main window (look at Adobe applications) when there's only one sidebar or drawer.

I'm all for palettes. They feel more Mac-ish to me, not being bound to any one window as toolbars, drawers, and sidebars are.

I prefer sidebars to drawers. I used to think drawers were kind of cool but too many applications used them when sidebars would have been a better option (if most users are going to keep the drawer visible more than 50% of the time then it should be a sidebar IMHO). As far as palettes and sidebars goes it really depends on the functions of the applications. In a case of an application like Photoshop where you may have multiple documents open at once then I think the palettes works very well. But for applications that aren't opening multiple documents I think that sidebars result in a much cleaner application.

In general I like drawers. I'm new to the Mac world, but to me the drawer looks much slicker than palettes or sidebars. Palettes aren't bad, but I really don't like having to move a bunch of windows around to keep my workspace organized. At least with drawers (and sidebars) the clutter is kept to a minimum.

Someone might say that Expose helps organize windows but it really doesn't. Expose helps deal with the problem after it has been created, it does not help avoid it.

My $0.02 anyway.

I say Sidebars. I hate having to drag the palettes all around if they get in the way. They're often also thicker than the sidebars, taking up more space than would a thin sidebar. But that all depends, really, on how many sidebars and palettes are on the screen, and the sizes they choose to make them. For me, it all comes down to how much of my space is taken from the area I can manipulate.

I don't have a preference. As long as the interface helps me do what I want quickly and easily, I don't care if it's a drawer, a sidebar, a palette or whatever. I can't imagine trying to use sidebars in Photoshop, for example. It would be a giant cludge, and I'd have to fight the interface the whole time. Palettes work better in this case.

As far as palettes are concerned, however, I love the dockable palettes in InDesign. I think they should be used across the CS apps.

What I don't understand is how a drawer differs from a sidebar. They're both typically collapsable, they both take up horizontal width. They only differ in graphic treatment.