Dynamic Current Folder line

While Current Folder line is pretty useful, it may be improved even more to allow fast navigation through sub-folders of any of the parents folders. Let me explain:

Let's take the Current Folder line pointing to some folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\New Pictures\

Currently it is possible to Shift+click on any of the parent folders to navigate to it.

Imagine that, while moving the mouse pointer over any of the parent folders, it would display a small drop down arrow (a kind of combo-box around the currently pointer folder). The drop down would disappear once the mouse cursor leaves the folder name area.

When clicking on the drop down arrow, it would display a popup menu with the list of direct sub-folders of the selected folder, and allow navigating through the folder structure using popup menus hierarchy. Since second-level popup menues are opened automatically, not requiring mouse clicks, it makes navigation very easy.

From the user experience prespective, it would allow navigating deep hierarchies with two mouse clicks (one to open the drop down, and second to select the destination folder), instead of using Shift+click to move to the folder, and then double-clicking through the sub-folders (I know about auto-select/single-click Windows XP option but don't use it). Such a feature quite resembles, or even out-preforms, navigation using Windows Explorer's left-side folder tree, where one could simply click on plus icons to access sub-folders.

What do you think?

--Andrew S. 26 Jul 2006

Internal functions: Navigation

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