I've been having some problems with the sidebar for a while... just wondering if I'm the only one For some reason, my APML file got corrupted a few days ago. I believe this happened after I added 10-20 watch words reflecting recent interest and reloaded a large OPML file into Particls, reflecting recent subscriptions in my aggregator (Netvibes, about 500 feeds). So, Particls was no longer starting. When I tried to see what was in the APML file, I could not view its content with a file editor (although it had a size of about 400KB): just blank... This had happened to me before, so I knew what to do: rename the %appdata/particls% directory, reinstall Particls, restore my OPML file, retype all my watchwords into Particls, rerate my sources and words. After a while I found that the sidebar was not bringing me any new stuff. So I reverted to the ticker, which works fine, just as before. And I've been using the ticker for a few days. Every so often, I disable the ticker and enable the sidebar to see if it will show me some new items, but no: it seems pretty much stuck... Any hint?

[What follows is after install of 0.9.2355]

New items seem to be entering the sidebar from the bottom. Is this what you want?

When a new item appears in the sidebar, it doesn't necessarily go to the top, which is what I would expect. The strange thing is that even when the sidebar is sorted by date (newest first), it seems to get reordered continously. And some items that I have seen for a long time and that I would be happy to see disappear just stick on top of the sidebar. Looks like the "sort by date" still has some "sort by relevance" factor.

I'm not saying this is bad though: actually I think it's very nice to rank according to a mixture of "most recent" and "most relevant" ...  The sidebar is working pretty well for me now. When I see something that I feel shouldn't stay there too long, I try to understand why it is there and lower the (source or word) rating.

I like the new sidebar, but I have absolutely no idea what the buttons down at the bottom do. I can kinda figure it out by clicking on them, but I'm not sure what I'm seeing. Tooltips would be nice.

I haven't tried those yet... Did you find any one particularly useful so far?

link to tangler page

config window

subscription helper

watch words window

 change the sort order

toggle auto-hide 

OK thanks, not sure I need these icons, with my small screen

But I think I would like icons making it easy to change the rating of a source or a topic. A short-cut  for things like "show me more/less content from this source / about these subjects"  Looks like we would need two "+" and two "-" icons to do this...

Not sure we need the source icon (at the left of each item in the sidebar). It looks nice, bringing some colour, but it carries very little info, and takes space.  I'd prefer the "+" and "-" instead.

At the very least it would be nice to have it go away when the width is set below a certain threshold. What is the point of having the full width favicon, if the post is only 1 character per line?

I'd also like to report that changing the primary logo screws with the sidebar's width. At least as long as auto-hide is turned on 

Francois - if you right click on an item you will see a 'show me more' and 'show me less' set of options

The idea of hiding the fav icons and/or replacing them with action items is great - will keep it in mind!

Yes, I have been using the right click options a lot lately, just thought that the action items would be faster

Francois, i was actually thinking the same thing myself the other day with having the favicons, also the action items, but hehe, if you saw our "wish list" already....

In the next build i hope to have tool tipson the tool items, but i didn't get to them in time for this build.

I just updated to the new version. Two things went through my mind.

1) Oh, buttons. Cool.

2) What is with that ugly black box around the sidebar. 

Haha - it's not a black box - it's a black panel with the sidebar ontop of it

What's everyone else's thoughts on the black panel behind the sidebar

I suppose you'll need a dark panel if you want the icons at the bottom to be visible. If these icons weren't there, I think the panel would look better if it were invisible (using same light-blue // background colour of sidebar). As I mentioned above, I'm not convinced that these icons are really useful

We think that those icons (among some other things we have planned) will help users who first install the app to get stared - because we have found a lot of people have 'what now' moments when they first install Particls

The background does not need to be black for the icons though - some argue that it should be 'highlight color' - that is the color of the tab on the more info panels

Two buttons I would find useful:
1. When autohide is off, toggle width of sidebar from small (for me, this is about 6 cms) to full width (13 cms)
2. Mark all current items in the sidebar as read: to be used whenever I decide that I will not open the items currently visible in the sidebar.

I love your second suggestion Francois. That would be great to be able to do that.

 Black panel, black box. Whatever you call it, I think it looks a bit tacky. I like the grey bar at the bottom for the buttons but I dislike the black panel