I was thinking Apple could change the sidebar to a full-fledged shelf with some relatively minor changes. It doesn’t make sense to me to have a separate dedicated shelf since it would be almost identical to the sidebar aside from the poof/proxy functionality. And the sidebar already inplements some shelf functions such as Rename and Move to Trash.
I’m thinking it would work like the following:
Drag an item to the sidebar and you get a proxy. Drag that item to a folder and the proxy is removed from the sidebar and the file it was pointing to is moved to the destination. Holding down Option would instead copy the item and leave the proxy in the sidebar. Holding Option and Command would of course create an alias.
Dragging multiple files to the sidebar would generate a single proxy that would represent all the files. Instead of the NeXT hand holding a deck of cards icon, the icon could be the icon Apple uses in the info windows and copy panels for multiple files. The one with three gray documents. If you click the group, it’s files would show up as if it were a folder. You could also rename it to something more useful than “25 Items”.
“Default Items” such as Home, drives etc. can be rearanged but not dragged out unless the Command key is held down. This is similar to how the Jaguar toolbar did it and would prevent users from accidentially moving these locations.
Proxies could be removed without affecting the items they point to by clicking delete. This would bring down a sheet asking if you want to remove the item from the sidebar. There could also be a Remove from Sidebar item in the File menu.
While I’m on the subject of the sidebar, here are a couple of other possible changes:
Clicking eject should highlight the default location such as Home instead of always going to Computer. (unless that’s your default location)
If there’s a scroll bar and you drag an item to the edge it should scroll automatically.
Then there’s the width. It should be based on the last time you resized it in a window generated with the “New Finder Window” command. e.g. You press Command N and get a Finder window with a reasonably sized sidebar. You then drag an item with a 100 character name into it. Now, if you create a new folder on the Desktop and then open it, the sidebar will be the same size as the previous window (the one generated with Command N). If you then resize the sidebar the size will only be remembered for that folder. So next time you choose New Finder Window the sidebar wont be massively wide.
Doug
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