Investigating Windows Vista's 'breadcrumb bar'

In a previous column "An in-depth look at Windows Vista's Virtual Folders technology", we mentioned that Virtual Folders are but one component of a whole set of new and improved data and file management features that Microsoft calls Windows Vista's new information visualisation, organisation, and search features.

As I explained, Virtual Folders are designed to relieve us of the common data management nightmares we all experience right now in our location-based storage system in which we create folders and subfolders and even more subfolders in an attempt to keep our data organised.

While Virtual Folders will be extremely valuable for most data management operations, the location-based storage system has been around for such a long time and is essentially so ingrained in our computer psyches that it is almost impossible to completely give it up. Microsoft knows it too. As such, within Windows Vista, you'll still find Windows Explorer and Computer -- formally My Computer.

What's different?
The dramatic user interface changes found throughout Windows Vista extend into Windows Explorer and Computer. These UI changes primarily show up in the multitude of ways that you can display file and folder icons via a slider control that allows you to dynamically adjust the icon size from Details view to Icon view as well as anything in between. Then there are the high-resolution thumbnails that preview the document's content. Along with Virtual Folders, these enhanced icon views will definitely help improve navigation. However, the navigation feature that I want to focus on in Windows Explorer and Computer is referred to "breadcrumbs."

Understanding the breadcrumb navigation system
You can quickly get a grasp on the abstract idea of breadcrumbs as a navigational tool, if you think of Hansel and Gretel. For a more concrete example, look towards the top of this page and you'll see the following breadcrumbs:

Home : Desktops, Laptops & OS : Article

As you can see, these breadcrumbs show your current position on the site as an Article on the Desktops, Laptops & OS page which in turn resides on the Home page. If you can trace your computer origins back to DOS, you can quickly understand that this is simply a path. However, unlike a DOS path, the path, or breadcrumbs, on this page are links you can click to navigate to the Desktops, Laptops & OS page or the Home page.

Introducing the Breadcrumb bar
In Windows Vista's Windows Explorer and Computer, you'll discover that the Address bar that has been around since Windows 98 and displayed a DOS-like path, has been revamped with a breadcrumb navigation system, which for lack of a better term at this point in the beta, we can call a "Breadcrumb bar." As you can imagine, this Breadcrumb bar looks like and serves a similar purpose as its predecessor. However, rather than being a static representation of the path, the Breadcrumb bar is completely "live." In other words, not only can you click on any folder name listed in the Breadcrumb bar to access that folder, but you can click on the arrow icon that appears in between each folder name and access a drop-down menu that lists all the sub folders contained in that particular folder.

Thus, you can use the Breadcrumb bar to navigate to any folder on your hard disk. In fact, you can think of the Breadcrumb bar as a horizontal Folders tree.

With this in mind, here's the bonus. In Windows Vista's Windows Explorer and Computer, you can close the traditional Folders tree, and finally have a completely unobstructed view of a folder's contents.

Once the Folders tree is out of the picture, you'll very quickly discover that you will easily adapt to using the Breadcrumb bar as your primary means of hard disk navigation. You'll also gain a much better appreciation of the Back and Forward buttons as they add versatility to the Breadcrumb bar navigation system.

The unobstructed view
As I mentioned, one of the benefits of using the Breadcrumb bar as your primary navigation system, is that it allows you to have a much better view of the folder's contents. The main factor here is that Windows Vista doesn't employ the Tasks Explorer Bar in Windows Explorer and Computer. As such, when you close the Folders tree, the space becomes available for file and folder icons.

As you know, in Windows XP you can indeed close the Folders tree (a.k.a. the Folders Explorer Bar), but when you do, the Tasks Explorer Bar appears in its place and there's no way to close it.

Adding to this unobstructed view is the fact that the standard menu bar (File Edit View Favorites Tools Help) and the Standard Buttons Toolbar are now hidden by default. In its place is a more concise toolbar that features a set of drop-down menu buttons that include Organize, which displays a menu including Rename, Move, Copy, E-mail, and Delete commands; Views, which lets you set the icon size; Show/Hide, which allows you to toggle the display of various UI elements; and a Share button.

Conclusion
Now, as I close this issue, it's important that I remind you that you have to take this information with a grain of salt at this point in time, considering the fact that Windows Vista's release date is over a year a way and the operating system is still in a state of flux.

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