Drawer HIG - please comment

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi Marco,
sorry for taking so long to reply. Here are my comments:

On 19.06.2012 17:06, Marco Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
> i did some work on that:
>
> there are two prototype components in my new scratch repo:
> scratch/mart/drawercomponents

Yay, components! :)

> one is called Drawer, and behaves like Okular Active
>
> the other one is called ContextPanel and works like the file browser

Hmm... Was there a particular reason behind this naming? Imo the wording has to 
be consistent between the HIG and the accompanying components. I'm not strongly 
attached to the names I used in the HIG, but I'd like to use the words that 
describe the elements best in the end, so I'd like to hear the reasons behind 
your naming. If your reasoning makes more sense then mine, I'll change the 
wording in the HIG. If we agree that my names work better, I'd ask you to change 
the component names. Or if someone comes up with even better names, we can of 
course both switch to them.
In the end, the actual names probably are not that important, but consistency 
is. For the HIG and the component library to work as a team, they have to use 
the same names.

> usability wise i have some questions that are maybe worth being discussed:
> * is there any use case where it should morph on the fly from one type to
> another? (it would become a single component with 2 modes, but code wise very
> complicated)

Erm, please never allow things like that. I have suggested in the HIG that it 
should be possible to adjust  the split drawer's (the one you call context 
panel) width if it makes sense, but it always has to stay the same kind of 
drawer. Otherwise it's totally confusing for the user.

> * they are now limited to be at the right side of the screen and only one: it
> would be possible to support for a panel on each side or having the side left
> or right configurable. again, the code would be a bit more complex, so only if
> is worth the effort ;)

As I already replied to Felix Michel's suggestion in this thread: I'd like to 
reserve the left side for the Menu Flap, so Drawers should stay on the right.

> * how should behave when screen rotation will be supported?
> i was thinking about keeping them fixed to the right side, and when the screen
> is vertical making the flaps aligned to the bottom center of the screen with
> vertical slide instead: just a possibility, still not implemented

Hmm... that's a tricky one. From a screen space usage perspective, it would make 
sense to have them vertical in portrait mode (for the Overlay Drawer it doesn't 
matter since it's almost full screen anyway, but for the Split Drawer / Context 
Panel, it does make a difference). On the other hand, it may be confusing 
because other elements on the screen (like the top bar) rotate while the drawers 
move to another screen edge.
How much work would it be to implement prototypes for both variants so we can 
test them with users? This is something I wouldn't like to decide without testing.

Cheers,
Thomas