Sorry for the late reply...
tiest vilee wrote:
a) I have tuned it so I have to click along the top to get the tab to open - taking advantage of fitt's law and stopping the shelves opening by accident. But the auto-hide works doesn't work properly like this: if I leave the mouse where it is (along the top edge, remember that Edge Bump is off) then the shelves disappear as if the mouse wasn't actually residing on the shelves - very annoying!
All this requires is for the 'hotspot' that keeps the shelves open to include the top/bottom edge of the screen.
I'm not sure I follow... Edge bump is off but you click on the top edge to open WorkShelf? Hmm... Where exactly are you clicking on then? And can I assume that the shelf is docked to the top edge?
tiest vilee wrote:
Why not make the selection area for icons as big as possible, touching each other? And if they extended all the way to the edge then the most frequent items, when up against the edge, would be tremendously easy and fast to select.
Because you need that 'empty' space between items in order to insert new items at that position with drag & drop, to drag the shelf around when undocked - otherwise you would instead drag the selected object - and to be able to add new items via the right click context menu. You can actually reduce this 'empty' space by decreasing the Horizontal Icon Spacing in the Shelf Preferences tab.