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Comment by tomhschmidt | Hacker News Reader

I still don't think most devs know what to do with the 'hamburger button'. Although some follow Brichter and use it as a handle to slide a side panel out, I've also seen it used strictly as a toggle to slide the same pannel out (OSX 10.8, OrderAhead). In other cases, I've seen it used to just reveal a popup options menu (Chrome) or act as a handle to reorganize lists (iOS).

Some consistency here would be nice.

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I've used the 'hamburger button' in my designs, as it's become a standard UI pattern, but I really dislike it.

It's an abstract icon that says "here's a bunch of hidden stuff that you're probably looking for"

I like it when used to simulate the affordance of a textured control that you can use as a virtual tactile handle, but as a symbol that represents 'menu'... I think it's a flawed convention.

The "hamburger" button is very strange element. It's often used in panels that slide horizontally, in which case the "grip" is going the wrong way. In my mind, the button would work in the physical world if it was rotated 90°. I've never been able to find out where it came from through, baring it's first appearance to me in the Facebook iOS app.

Yes and no, I did that in my most recent designs, but a touch grip is a skeuomorphic affordance -- which is fine as long as the control bar is always skeuomorphic as well. As you move more into a flat design, the 3 bars as a grip makes less sense.

It may have existed earlier, but the earliest I'm aware of it was in Path - who also invented a couple of other UI bits themselves (background-pan images, for example).

It definitely existed much earlier on the desktop. Avid Media Composer, non-linear editing software first brought to market in the late 80s had it. Not sure at what point it was added, but remember referring to the hamburger menu in the mid to late 90s.

Yeah a big problem on iOS is that Apple use it to indicate history while everyone else basically uses it for a sidebar.

Though I kinda blame apple here as they seemed to have started to introduce this after the sidebar use got a foothold so they aren't making it easier.

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