Hi:
As I mentioned to Philippe, after nearly three weeks working on the new
sidebar, it's still not finished and it's raised a number of sticky
issues, which makes me wonder if it's the right approach.
I was hoping to get a "somewhat" functional demo for people to play with
to spark some debate, however, getting a version that doesn't seem
totally broken is taking longer than I thought.
So, let me start by posing one of the problems to at least start the debate.
The new sidebar has is made up of two separate sidebars, one for the
"out of the box" collections, another for the "user" collections. This
means there are two separate sidebar selections. When you're displaying
the "out of the box" collections in the summary view, you're limited to
only collections in the "out of the box" sidebar. Likewise for the
"user" sidebar.
One problem is caused by an ambiguity of whether or not a
command/operation refers to selected items in both sidebars, the "out of
the box" sidebar, or the "user sidebar".
When the sidebar has the focus, it seems like you probably want to
consider the focused sidebar only. However when neither sidebar has the
focus, should you consider both sidebars together, or perhaps the last
one that had focus. If neither sidebar has focus, but only one is
"active" then we'd probably have to draw it differently otherwise you
couldn't tell which one the command would operate on. This might lead to
some confusion. It's breaking the simple, and universal notion, of a
single "active selection" -- it's like we have more than one "active
selection": the one where typing goes and the one when some other
command affecting the sidebar go.
As an exercise to help sort this out, go through them menus and ask
yourself the question: what should each command do given the various
combinations of focus and selections in both sidebars?
John
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