Where is the Mac Community on Drawers?

Posted March 12th, 2010 @ 02:35pm by Erik J. Barzeski

I'm building an app that's got a library component. Frankly, it seems like a great use for a drawer, but drawers seem to have gone the way of the dodo on the Mac.

Yet there's still a drawer in Pages, so… where does that leave us? Are drawers a complete no-no, generally? What other (somewhat recently updated) apps have drawers, if any?

5 Comments »

5 Responses to "Where is the Mac Community on Drawers?"

| Reply Matthew
Posted 16 Mar 2010 at 2:07pm #

I'm not a fan of them at all
| Reply crazyj
Posted 16 Mar 2010 at 6:14pm #

I despise drawers. Mostly because they are smaller than the full height of the rest of the window.

Could you use an iTunes-style "sidebar" instead?
| Reply nerg
Posted 16 Mar 2010 at 7:12pm #

Preview springs to mind and works well with multiple images depending on what you want to do
| Reply Robert McGovern
Posted 17 Mar 2010 at 4:33am #

Echofon for Mac is using Drawers and I personally like that.

Mind I seem to be one of the few (certainly among those I follow / am followed by on Twitter) that like Drawers. I guess only coming to the Mac in Jan 2007 helps.
| Reply Daniel
Posted 18 Mar 2010 at 9:28am #

TextWrangler still uses drawers.

I like them, because of the ability to hide and show them outside of the main window.

But, I may simply like the functionality they provide, and as long as there's another way to get that functionality (such as hiding and showing things in the main window) then that's fine too. Take as an example iCal, which used to make excellent use of the drawer functionality. They changed iCal in Snow Leopard (and maybe it was Leopard) to not use the drawer, and ever since then, it has been much more of a pain to use iCal. Why? Simply because they did not replicate the drawer functionality elsewhere. I used to leave the drawer open 100% of the time, because I liked what it did. Now that functionality is gone, along with the drawer.