[budgefrankly]

Drawers were a big feature of early MacOS X, as an alternative to NEXT's multiple columns. App's inherited from NEXT (email, finder, etc.) used columns still, but newer apps used drawers.

It was really well integrated, if the window was too close to the edge, the window would move as the drawer opened in a single smooth animation.

XCode in particular had drawers everywhere.

As iTunes became successful, and everything wanted to be brushed metal, drawers began to disappear in favour of columns.

It's quite hard on the modern internet to find images of that old UI, but here's Preview with its right-hand-side drawer: https://mac.elated.com/2007/05/09/displaying-images-in-the-r...