I tried my hand at developing a plugin - a slide-in panel that works from all four sides.
The panel
overlays
your main page and can be slid in on a mouse-click or mouse-hover. There
are lots
of other options for customization such as a grab handle, slide speed,
opacity,
peeking-in etc. The plugin is great for housing user options which
are only for occasional use, especially overlaid on to whole screen UIs
that demand the entire screen real estate.
https://github.com/pete-rai/jquery-slidein
Here are some demos:
My first plugin so all feedback most welcome.
Pete