[Stormchild]

Originally Posted by JKT

Not trivial at all as no sidebars in the OS have one - it would have to be hand coded and does not come for free from the OS.

I don't think those sidebars are a feature provided by the OS in the first place. In Mail, it's a custom NSView (I had a look at its nib files). In iTunes it's implemented some other way (iTunes is Carbon, doesn't have nib files).

In any case, it is quite trivial to create a scrolling view within a window (a matter of drag and drop in Interface Builder), and it is extremely simple to get the scrollbar to display at all times.

Here's the explanation from Apple's developer documentation for NSScrollView:

To make sure the scroller is visible, invoke the setHasVerticalScroller: method with an argument of YES.

And here's how we make it blue:

- (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor *)aColor

Doesn't seem too difficult to me.

Originally Posted by JKT

FWIW, you can just restore your Workspace snapshot to recover the size of your drawer.

Not too useful. That also replaces the contents of all your tabs (and even if the ones in the snapshots happen to be the exact pages you're viewing, it still reloads them all). That's even more hassle than just resizing it back manually.

Originally Posted by JKT

That's assuming you don't accidentally resize it the way you do with your drawers :p

Not a problem, because you can only resize a sidebar with the little gripper in the header/footer, or by very carefully placing your cursor on the 1px divider line. I have never, ever accidentally changed the width of my sidebar in Mail or iTunes. But it does happen once in awhile with OW's tab drawer, and is annoying.

Originally Posted by JKT

Good point about there being more room, but the consequence is that there is a miniscule target for resizing the sidebar

Not at all. Just put a little gripper on the same little header or footer bar that has the tab view mode buttons and action menu. This would look quite lovely if done in the same style as Mail.

Originally Posted by JKT

FWIW, the blue background is pretty indistinct on my PowerBook LCD.

I find it very easy to tell the difference on my PowerBook display (the October 2005 PowerBook G4, 15"). If I look at it from an extreme viewing angle, the sidebar background becomes lighter than the white content area, and at a very specific point in between, the sidebar and content area appear equally light (but are still separated by a very obvious black border). At all normal viewing angles, it looks quite distinct, and in any case the border always clearly separates it.

Originally Posted by JKT

Something for Apple to fix if they can be bothered, but I suspect that OmniGroup aren't even going to have the option of retaining drawers in the future as Apple is probably going to ban them.

Think so? I can't see that happening. A lot of programs use them. I've not heard anything about Apple wanting to phase them out either.

Originally Posted by JKT

Try using Safaristand for a while if you haven't already.

I hadn't, so I checked it out. It has a lot of nice little features. Bit sloppy and unpolished though. Seems to be no way to use the sidebar without also having the regular tabs visible. I like that you can change the thumb size, and actually, I just thought of another idea for tabs:

OW could optionally start reducing the height (but not the width) of tab thumbnails if you start creating more than can fit into your drawer/sidebar. Once you have enough that the thumbnails would be useless, it could automatically change them into text-only tabs. If you open so many tabs that they won't all fit even as text, they could simply become smaller (by reducing the vertical padding). Obviously some people wouldn't want this, so it would be optional, but I'd find it quite handy myself, and could potentially solve the problem of needing a scrollbar in the sidebar at all.

While there are some irrefutable reasons to keep the drawer as an option, I think the sidebar idea is quite viable and I'm sure many people would prefer it.