I’m here to complain about the sidebar and its “auto-hide feature”.
First, it doesn’t work. Mouse hovering across a nebulous border country of the Plex Media Player will sometimes pop out the sidebar, sometimes not. It’ll sometimes pop out and stay there forever until you pass over some other nebulous border country, often outside the bounds of the app itself.
(I am running this on Mac OS.) Perhaps there’s a timer involved, which only makes the feature worse.
Second, even if the feature works, which it does not, it does not meet the ostensible goals. Its primary effect is to simply obscure what I’m trying to look at, and to be absent when I am trying to utilize the sidebar. Is the intent to allow for more application real estate to show us our content? Great! But it doesn’t do that! It hides content! The way to display more content at one time for the user is to NOT obscure it with an opaque sidebar overtop it. No? Is its intent to be easily accessible when needed? It does not do that. It is too often hidden when needed, and the user is left to hover all over it to get it to appear. Are developers claiming testing shows this feature is in a usable state (i.e. the UI triggers of its behavior are perceivable by users of the app without much trouble)? I doubt this is the case.
Would love to hear other users’ experience with this feature, which I believe came and went and came back in Plex releases.
