The Notes 8.5 sidebar will be more scalable and eaiser to manage

Mary Beth Raven  August 15 2008 09:13:08 AM

We've made the sidebar in Notes 8.5 more scalable. We've also  made it easier to manage turning on or off different sidebar panels.

First, the scalability part. We've made it easier to drag up or down and have other panels get smaller.  We also added the ability to keep dragging and have the title bars collapse into a row of icons, either at the top or the bottom, as shown in the screenshot below. And yes, these are screenshots of a daily beta build. So you'll be able to play with this yourself in the upcoming Public Beta 2 soon.

Figure: Samantha can drag up or down and collapse panels into a row of icons.


If you have lots  and lots of sidebar panels and there are too many to fit as icons, you get an overflow indicator, and the additional panels appear in the overflow menu. We also added 2 menu items to the overflow:

The first is the "Sidebar Panels"  with its list of panels. You can remove or put back panels by checking them "On" or "Off". This menu item is in Notes 8, however, it was only on the View menu, and users had a hard time finding it. It's still on the view menu, but now  it is reachable from the sidebar itself.

The second is the "Sidebar" general menu that allows you to make the sidebar open, thin, or closed. This was only only on the View menu in Notes 8.

Figure: the overflow menu


Last,to make it even easier to manage your panels, we added the Sidebar Panels menu item to each sidebar panel (we did not want you to have to have an overflow in order to get to it.)

Figure: The "Sidebar Panels" menu item is on every Panel menu



And yes, I really do have the countdown to Lotusphere in my sidebar.

While I designed  this interaction, Jamie Liu is the developer who made it all happen. So when you see her in 162 days at Lotusphere, tell her "Thanks!"

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