[acollins]

Also, it may not count for much but panes seem to be a more natural UI paradigm than drawers. Perhaps my experience is limited but when OS X first made its debut I had trouble figuring drawers out. Not how to use them, but whether the use of a drawer indicated items that I was only supposed to use infrequently or if it was just a way of unifying an aspect of the interface that was logically grouped together.

It seems like many applications' use of drawers falls into the latter category, and I find that I infrequently use an application without having its drawers always visible (iCal, the old Watson, OmniOutliner). The one exception that I have found has been NetNewsWire's subscriptions drawer.

While I agree that drawers are more versatile, my experience has not been that they are necessarily more useful. Maybe it depends on whether you view an OO file as a document or a more interactive application. As a document, the drawer's contents may be used less frequently. As an application, however, the drawer's contents seem to be more ubiquitous.

Just my two cents. :)