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18 Nov 2004
The category pane
I noticed that some MicroContent clients have a fourth pane. I will call this the category-pane. I am not sure whether this is a good name. It can also be called hierarchy-pane. The category-pane works similar to the Find category view. The pane consists of two or more columns. In each column the values of a certain metadata-field are presented. The first item in a column designates all values of that metadata-field. Selecting a single metadata value will show in the next column the available values of that metadata-field. Etc.
It is a pane intermediate between the lists-pane and the items-pane. The category-pane is especially useful when a list contains many items. As not many applications have incorporated this pane into their client, I will analyse it further.
The iTunes category-pane consists of three columns. The leftmost column is the genre-field, the middle column the artist-field and the right column the album-field. These three columns present a hierarchy genre is broader than artist, which is broader than album.
WineXT is also an example of a client with four panes. The category-pane consists of 5 columns: countries, regions, areas, classifications and wine types. And again this is also a hierarchy. The user can select the countries he wants to see through the Preferences menu-item. And the user can adapt the width of each column and thus have it disappear.
And even Finder has a columns-pane (inherited from NeXTSTEP). But I am not sure whether I should call this a MicroContent client.
I guess many MicroContent clients can add such a fourth category-pane. Delicious Library could have columns such as genre, author, books. And also weblog-clients which use categories and subcategories might profit from this.