I’ve always been a fan of the flotilla or super-palette method. More interfaces should start using the concept.

Looking begrudgingly forward to CS4.

First, a comment on what we were attempting to accomplish with the new CS3 interface. As part of the research we did for figuring out what problems we wanted to solve, I took a hard look at just how different the palette-based interface had become in each of the Creative Suite applications. Take a look at the chart below. You’ll see a list of palette interface behaviors on the left. If a product had that behavior, a circle appears in the column for that product. You’ll see that many of the products did not have the same behaviors, and even when they did, often the behavior was implemented differently between the applications as indicated by the circle with a dot in the middle. These inconsistencies had developed over the years because every product used its own unique UI code.

For example, only InDesign and GoLive had palette stashing at the time, but the stashing behavior was very different between the two applications. The main objective of the new CS3 interface was to create a single, consistent implementation of as many of these existing (and some new) palette behaviors as possible so that the user experience between InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash would be the same.

IMHO, I think we accomplished this main objective. However, as many of you InDesigners have pointed out, it did mean that we had to make some sacrifices along the way. Specifically, we were not able implement the ability to have more than one collapsed panel open as a drawer. This wasn’t because we didn’t think it was a useful behavior — it was simply a tradeoff we were forced to make due to our time constraints.

Let’s just say that we’ve most definitely heard your feedback on this issue and plan (had always planned) to resolve this in the next iteration of this new common user interface.

Despite this shortcoming, hopefully by now you’ll have discovered some of the benefits of the CS3 implementation over the previous CS2 implementation. For example:

Horizontal Labels — The CS2 stashed palettes displayed the names of the palettes vertically. Not only did this make them hard to read, it was a waste of space as vertical screen real estate is more valuable than horizontal (just imagine the German version!). For CS3, the panel names are displayed horizontally by default, along with an icon.

Icons Only — over time, you may not need to see the names of the panels anymore, so you are able to conserve horizontal real estate as well by collapsing the panels even further to just an icon representation. If you still need a reminder of what panel an icon represents, you can get a tool tip by hovering over the icon.

Easier Management & Customization — You no longer need to know the secret handshake of holding down modifier keys to stash/unstash a group of palettes. Now, you can simply grab the strip above the panel tabs to dock, undock or reorder a group of panels within a dock. You can also reorder panels within a group by simply dragging the tabs within a group.

Better Tab Key Behavior — This is perhaps my favorite new behavior. The Tab key used to simply be a convenient way to toggle the palettes between being visible and hidden. In CS3, pressing Tab still hides the panels, but it also puts them in a special accessible mode. Rather than pressing Tab again to pop the panels back, simply mouse over to the edge of the monitor and the panel dock will temporarily expand. When you mouse out of the panel area, they automatically hide themselves again. This is one of the workarounds for those of you who want “more than one drawer open when the panels are collapsed”. This mode gives you back all of your screen real estate when the panels are hidden, and sliding over to the edge of the monitor brings the panels back with whatever panels you want expanded. If you want to hide your panels on the left, but still keep the Tools panel visible, then use the old Shift+Tab gesture instead.

Finally, if you don’t like the new docking behavior, you don’t have to use it. The CS3 applications all still support the old “floating palettes” behavior. Simply remove all the panel groups from a dock and let them float.

One suggestion however if you opt for this approach — when the panel groups float, they do not react to each other. In other words, making a panel group taller does not cause the panel group(s) below to resize. You end up with the panel group you are resizing covering up the panel groups below. Yuck. As an alternative, you can attach a panel group to the bottom of another panel group to create a “floatilla” of sorts. Then, you can double-click on a panel tab to reduce the panel down to just its tab. In the screenshot below, I’ve ripped out all the panel groups from the default layout, and attached them to each other by dragging the strip above a panel group’s tabs to the bottom of another panel group (look for the blue highlight before letting go — another user experience improvement that gives you feedback about what will happen when you let go.)

You can now position this floatilla anywhere you want on the screen, or even on a second monitor. Then, if you want more than one panel expanded, simply double-click on the panel tab(s) you want to expand.

I hope this helped explain a bit of the thinking that went on behind the scenes as we were designing the CS3 interface, gave you a few tips for using the new interface, and reassured you that we do listen and appreciate your feedback as it helps us make future improvements.

Cheers,

Michael Ninness
InDesign Senior Product Manager
(and former CS3 Senior UI Designer)

My complaint really with CS3 is that I can only have one docked panel open at a time. I loved being able to have open, docked panels on the left and right side of the screen.

The only advantage that I see with the new style is that you can have two columns on a single screen edge.

I’ve grown used to the new style and I don’t really notice it anymore, but I work on a widescreen. I also notice that I no longer collapse any of my pallets since the new style was adopted.

Incidentally, that Fitt’s Law comment applies to all the palettes - really ridiculous UI design to exclude a pixel or two of the screen edge from being active to toggle the state of the palettes.

I generally drag the side of the CS3 docks down so that all I see are icons. This is a great space-saver and it only took about a day to learn the icons for the panels I use most often.

Note that you can have more than one panel open at a time… you just have to pull them out of the dock first!