
There are a number of questions we'd like to pose to you to get your (and everyone else's) thoughts on. Please post your feedback in reply.
Pane Display
How should the project pane appear?
We could make it appear as a flyout with light dismiss, similar to the various other Settings flyouts. You'd display it either via the app bar or a hotkey. Then it would hide away when you tap outside of it.
Sublime is different in that while a project is open, it's always shown as a sidebar. I'm not sure if that is as desirable in a more touch friendly app like Code Writer where the app can be resized very thin. Do you think the flyout design is better for Code Writer?
Root Folder Count
Sublime lets you display multiple root folders for a project. This is nice in scenarios where there are potentially various related project folders but that are in separate folder hierarchies. The downside of this setup is that if we add some form of SCM (source control management) like Git later on, that really only works when you have a single root file folder.
Thus we are thinking that when you create a new project, you would select a single root folder. And future enhancements for SCM would then be possible. We would allow you to switch between projects easily too, so that would help with the rare scenario where you do need to access several root folders for a project (you could make a project for each one).
Tree vs. Flat Display
Sublime shows a tree of folders/files but that doesn't seem to be an optimal way to manage navigation where screen space is limited. We are thinking about having more of an explorer-like display where you have a breadcrumb bar at the top and a flat list of folders and files at the bottom. There also would be a button to move up a folder level, or you could click on breadcrumb items to jump to an ancestor folder.
Item Display
What overall info would you like to see in the item display. Files for instance could have filename, type description, size, date modified, icon. If we include all that info, each item will be about 50px tall and will span the width of the flyout. Note that 40px is the minimum size recommended for tappable UI elements, so this is touch friendly.