Filed under: Software, Surveys and Polls
Mac DevCenter: palettes or sidebars?
Following a dilemma that Gus Mueller faced when designing the UI for his latest release of VoodooPad 3, Mac DevCenter has posted a request for feedback on this most heated of UI topics: palettes or sidebars? Preferences can easily sway in either direction, and I personally miss the old-school functionality of Mail's pre-Tiger drawer (yay for column widths that don't have to be constantly re-adjusted), though I will concede that the drawer look is old and ugly by today's slick UI standards of palettes and sidebars.But what do you TUAW readers think? Do you prefer palettes, like in Photoshop, OmniOutliner, iWeb and Pages, or do you prefer the sidebar UI of Tiger's Mail, ecto and NetNewsWire's subscriptions panel (though it's interesting to note that NNW also uses a drawer for its site catalog)? Sound off.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
daveu said 12:04PM on 7-31-2006
i'm a drawer man. i love mail's ui.
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James Bienhi said 12:07PM on 7-31-2006
Yawn. How bout a way to open folders in list view by default?
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FSFunky said 12:26PM on 7-31-2006
Palettes 4 lyfe. Give me as much control of the interface as possible.
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theboyk said 12:33PM on 7-31-2006
I love the combination palette/drawer ability of InDesign. Now, if only ALL parts of the CS would use this...
k.
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coalxman said 12:45PM on 7-31-2006
nothing easier than drawers, clean, sweet, fun
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John Muir said 12:48PM on 7-31-2006
Drawers, with palettes used sparingly and in context.
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Dane said 12:53PM on 7-31-2006
I think that the myriad of palettes can be very obtrusive. I work with CS products all day, but there seems to be a difference between the palettes in CS versus the palettes in, say, iWeb. If there could be a nesting system developed (à la the Inspector, or the drag-and-nest system in Adobe CS), that would greatly improve the experience. It beats having to drag my color palette, THEN my font palette out of the way to get to the info that lays beneath.
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Adam Betts said 1:02PM on 7-31-2006
Just say no to Drawer. It's a bloated, stupid stupid design. Apps with drawers out of left, right and bottom sides made me very sick with high fever.
Sidebar is pretty much the way to go. Palette, depending on their needs, can be good too.
But I do not understand why Gus went with palette in final version. It obviously didn't work for Voodoo's UI.
Oh well, not every developers have the right eyes for UI.
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unreal mccoy said 1:04PM on 7-31-2006
drawer/sidebar
palettes drive me nuts...
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Josh said 1:15PM on 7-31-2006
I prefer sidebars, can't stand palettes and the drawer looks horrible. I am interested to see what Microsoft is doing with Office 2007 and the 'ribbons' on their toolbar. I think they might actually be on to something. I'd like to play around with them and see how they work as a palette replacement. Link below to see what I'm talking about....
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ui/overview.mspx
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Alex Hillman said 1:27PM on 7-31-2006
palettes seem to clutter, unless they lock into place. I find myself resetting my workspace layout to default on photoshop at LEAST once a session, because stuff gets unruly. i agree, though, that too many drawers make an otherwise clean app look ridiculous very fast.
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Galen D. W. said 1:32PM on 7-31-2006
I like sidebars. I have a small screen so there isn't enought room for drawers and palletts get in the way of things.
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Mark Scrimshire said 1:42PM on 7-31-2006
I find that pallettes in Microsoft Office 2004 to be just clutter and less than helpful.
Pallettes can work well when you have multiple displays and lots of screen real estate but for laptop users (a fast growing group of users) screen real estate is at a premium and pallettes tend to get in the way of doing work.
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Pete said 1:45PM on 7-31-2006
Drawers have a kind of temporary feel about them, so I think they can coexist with sidebars for different purposes (not on the same side, preferably).
I hate palettes when they seem largely unnecessary (such as in Office) and clutter up my screen. Some apps really require them though -- Omnigraffle without palettes would be a lot more painful.
A bigger issue for me is toolbars. These should really be attached to each window, and never floating below the menu IMHO. There are solid benefits to having a menu at the top of the screen, but they don't apply to things just below the top (the mouse doesn't stop there) and the disappearing/reappearing trick just irritates me. I'd rather have one per window so I don't need to move my mouse as far (isn't that the point of them anyway?).
Hmmm... looking back through that, I guess I just don't like the Office UI much at all ;)
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bt said 1:54PM on 7-31-2006
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.
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Rob said 2:08PM on 7-31-2006
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.
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Tom von S. said 2:23PM on 7-31-2006
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.
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Twist said 3:47PM on 7-31-2006
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.
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Milk said 8:06PM on 7-31-2006
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.
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Jamison said 9:40PM on 7-31-2006
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.
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