The Item pane

Continuing my discussion of the MicroContent client, I want to have a look at the item-pane. Remember an ideal MicroContent client has three panes: a list pane, an item pane and a view pane. The view pane shows the content of a MicroContent item. The item pane shows a summary of multiple MicroContent items. And the list panes presents one or multiple lists with MicroContent items. Again I follow examples as I found them in MacOSX.

The basic format of the item pane is a column-view. Each row stands for a MicroContent item. And each column shows most often the metadata of each MicroContent item. Often a user can specify the sorting of the items by clicking on the header of a column. Sometimes the user can specify which metadata (or data) is presented in a column. Clicking on a row selects the MicroContent item and presents the MicroContent item in the view-pane. There are often keyboard conventions for viewing the next item, such as the down or up arrow.

Under MacOS-X many applications using this Item-pane can be found:

pMpost presents weblog-entries. In my version I have the title, the weblog, the category and publication date as columns. Under the the View menu-item the user can check which metadata is presented as a column.

In MacGourmet my item-pane consists of the name of the recipe, the source, my rating and an icon if an image is present. In this program the user can not change which columns are presented. And this pane is also used to present (and create sublists). I find this an inconsistency of the application.

In NetNewsWire the item-pane (only visible in the traditional view) shows if an item is flagged or not, a a read/not read indicator, the title of a weblog-entry, the creator, the date and the subject. In the View-menu item the user can toggle which columns he wants to see. In addition the user can specify if he wants to see a single line summary and a dateline below each row. This is a nice way to extend the information for each item. This pane is in this application called table. Interestingly this application also has a combined item and view pane, which is called combined view. In this combined view the MicroContent item is presented below the metadata row. An open/close triangle allows the user the hide or unhide the MicroContent.

Another application that uses an item pane is iTunes. In my version I have the song name, duration of song, artist, album and genre as columns. The user can add remove columns with the menu item View options under the Edit menu. As you can see there is still some consistency to be found. Alt-clicking on the titles of the columns allows a user also to select or de-select columns. Double-licking on the song starts ‘viewing’ the MicroContent item (hearing the song). Clicking on arrows behind song-names, artist or album will select the the relevant information in the iTunes MusicStore. The arrows is a new interface convention for accessing related public information and can be used in other programs as well. iTunes has also a special convention for going to the next item: it happens automatically if you checked the song. It is not necessary to push any keys.

AddressBook is another application that presents an item. But this one behaves a bit differently than all the other applications. The items are presented as firstname+lastname or lastname+firstname. The user can change the display and sort order in the Preferences menu-item (yet another place to look). It is not possible to add other fields. So this is basically a single column item-pane.

A column view is not the only way to present items. MicroContent items that contain an image can be presented differently. The iTunes application is the poster child for this. This is the thumbnail view.

iTunes presents the items, the images, on a grid as thumbnails. The size of these thumbnails can be changed through a slider. Clcking on an item reveals some metadata and double clicking allows for editing the image.

Also the new kid on the block, Delicious Library, has an item pane. And interestingly enough they use both a column and a thumbnail view. The user can switch between both view by means of two buttons in the top-left corner of the item pane. The column I use in my application has very small thumbnails for the cover-pages (not really useful), the title, the creator, a five-point rating and whether I read/played the item. A column can be added or removed by alt-clicking on the titles or clicking on the operations icon. The thumbnail view shows the cover-pages of the books as they would be seen on a bookshelf. It is possible to change the size of the bookshelves by means of a slider. Clicking on an item reveals the metadata in the view-pane.

This idea of thumbnails can be extended to about any application. One which comes to mind is the web-browser Omniweb. They do not really follow the three-pane idea, but go a long way. The major part of this application is reserved for the view-pane, it is the pane where you see the HTML-pages. In their latest version they have added a drawer with thumbnails web-pages. Pages can be added to this drawer and by clicking on a thumbnail one switches the viewed page. This is very reminiscent of the item-pane in thumbnail mode. And it is even possible to switch to column-mode. In column mode only the (truncated) title of an item (webpage) is shown.

I think the finder can also be seen as a MicroContent client. Although the idea might be seen as a bit stretched. In this case the MicroContent items are the files in the system (or elsewhere). The finder under MacOS-X knows three viewing modes: icons, lists and columns. In these modes the items are presented. The icons-mode is similar to the thumbnail-mode. It show the icons of files in the system. Using the View Menu-item one can can change the size of the icons by means of a slider. The list-menu reminds of the item column-mode. In my case it presents the file-icon, the file-name, modification date, size and file kind. Again using the View Options one can change the columns one sees. The Finder list-mode also allows to add sublists, which can be opened or close by clicking on the triangle. (I think terminology is getting a bit mixed-up here). The third mode in Finder, the column-mode, is a mixed list/item-pane. I will discuss this one in another post.

I have been trying to show that there are many similarities between MicroContent clients and this might warrant some usability guidelines to make them a bit more similar.

Categories/tags: client
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