here’s an idea that I thought of for quite some time. It is that i often hear when I show a CUBA app to people, the first response is “this looks like a Windows application”. And with that it get a little bad reputation because “web application don’t have this title bar in 2018” - if you know what I mean. It is mainly that the normal layout looks a little bit dated.
I normally use the “Main Window with responsive side menu” in my apps, because first of all it looks a little bit newer.
Also it takes the aspect ratio of normal screens more into consideration. Normally there is less space regarding the height compared to the width. Therefore putting the menu to the side leverages that fact.
Since you already introduced the side menu layout quite some time ago, it might be a good point to switch in 7.0 to give the newly applications a little “fresh look”.
It is not so much regarding the effort that has to be done to get that look for your own app, but rather the overall first look experience will probably be improved for people looking at it.
I believe that default “side menu” occupies too much horizontal space.
To make it default for all cuba platform apps it needs to be changed. Reduce it horizontally, or let it hides as in the mobile (low resolution) version.
As i said it is supported for low resolution as “mobileMenuButton”. My suggestion was to make this button default visible for all resolutions.
Also i still thinking that % of screen space need to be reconsidered for the side menu. In my opinion option[1] (see screenshot) is more acceptable but for sure it has some styling problems right now.
Interesting point. We have hesitated long before choosing between side or top menu. And in fact we are not settled yet.
Side menu is surely more modern and mobile friendly, but you loose the application folders, which is a great feature. I saw in this forum a solution to integrate them in the side menu but the result was clunky in my eyes.
Sure thing is, when application folders are well integrated, side menu will win for us. Plus, like mentionned here, styling improvement would also help.
That being said with CUBA 7 / Vaadin 8 I understood (maybe wrongly) that the UI will look more material/polymer style. That could do the trick.
