[Design] New Sidebar problems

[John Anderson]

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