An idea to get rid of drawers in the UI...

acollins

As a general rule, I don't like the drawers in OS X. Except in a few, rare, instances, I find them to be ugly and unintuitive to work with. The point of this thread is not to debate the use of drawers, however, but to discuss a solution for those of us who don't like them.



Is it possible, using the developer tools provided with Jaguar to edit the layout of a program, changing the .nib files so that a drawer actually appeared as a pane instead? I'm thinking specifically of Apple's Mail.app; instead of the two panes and a drawer, it could be a more standard three pane interface.



I have used interface builder to give some apps a brushed appearance, to change the layout of buttons, and to change the text of some menus. This is what gave me the idea of changing drawers to panes. I did an option+cut & paste between the Mail.app .nibs, but had no success. Maybe some classes would have to be changed, or something...



I know zero Cocoa programming, so maybe the whole idea is just preposterous. If it's possible, could someone tell me how? Just thought I'd throw it out there...



Andrew

ibrowse

Cocoa uses different ways of calling drawers, alerts, sheets etc. Changing anything in Interface Builder that would contain any new objects at all would require editing the project files for it to work again, and unfortunately you can't do that. With Mail.app the closest I think you will be able to get would be to hide the drawer and just use the Mailbox menu. Sorry.