Submission details
Column View for Explorer
Not exactly a problem, more of a suggestion:
Windows Explorer is great, but I would love to be able to switch into a horizontally expanding column view like in OS X. This would be especially useful for navigating the deep folder heirarchies that I work with fairly often.
The navigation bar just doesn't cut it when you've got a lot of levels deep.
[Adding description since I'm not sure everyone understands]
Each column is a level of the folder hierarchy. So if I'm browsing Documents\college\comp540\ZipCodeClassifier\Backup\ZipCodeClassifier\Properties
then there's a column for the contents of the Documents folder, another for college folder another for comp540 folder and so on.
I actually think some kind of intuitive collapse in the middle would be the best design (perhaps folding in directories with not many options).
The idea of the feature is that I can be browsing here, and if I decide that I want to switch to a different folder - anywhere in the tree, I can just click over to it, without scrolling - it makes very efficient use of space.
If they could figure out some way to bifurcate the tree, so it split into a top half and a bottom half after the common path, that would enable you to watch two (or more) paths at once, and copy files between them. I might start working on a demo of this.
Create a mode for the explorer windows to expand the folder hierarchies horizontally.
This makes better use of a widescreen monitor rather than cramming the details into the navigation pane.
OS X's column view for Finder is an idea to start from, but perhaps it's patented.
Alternatively come up with some more creative way to navigate deep folder hierarchies.
I presume that data may indicate that many users don't have deep hierarchies, but then again that may be because windows makes it tricky to manage files this way.
Low
Medium
Not fixed
Discussion (7 comments)
Hmm, maybe if you click on a button on the navigation bar, the breadcrumb will expand into a column view, with the commands at the bottom. Kind of a bad idea though...
True, but the concept is nice. Windows needs usefull stuff like this. more TRUE innovation (sorry microsoft, skins and "icon less toolbars" or windows live messengers's me me go go pets dont count,)
Who gives a shit about coping. thats just immature talk from the mac fans and windows fans. microsoft "thinks" they are innovating but they fail so much (vista for example. Took 5 years to make because they wanted to add the less imporant things first. Glad tio see they learned their lesson this time around)
And the Ribbon UI. That was genius, too. The Reference tab in Word is a life-saver during research. Makes it so much easier.
Playing around in explorer, I'm not finding it terribly cumbersome navigating deep into directories. However, what I'm finding strange is that the nav pane no longer expands in tandem as you drill down. Perhaps they're using the breadcrumb bar to replace this functionality, to always allow quick access to the shortcuts on the left.
Didn't Windows XP and Windows 2000 have this functionality in certain cases? I'm not sure what the circumstances were, but sometimes the files would line up horizontally and not vertically. I'm not sure what activated this feature. Also, whenever you bring up a Save File dialouge, doesn't it do this? I don't think this is patented.
As far as innovation goes, just look at all the new Windows 7 features. Aero Peek, Aero Shake, Jumplists, and the new taskbar of course. Some Mac fans wll claim that this is a copy of the dock, but they can be easily disproven. It simply brings together the funcionality of quicklaunch (with Windows since 1997, behaves just like the dock but without the zoom) and the taskbar buttons (Since Windows 95) into an elegant new way of managing windows. In my opinion it's better than the dock, becasue your minimized windows aren't squished all the way to the far end of your application shortcuts, and it reduces redundancy.
Both the taskbar and dock has its postives and negtives. just like windows and mac
Changed problem description.
hoopla_punta wrote on December 4, 2008, 2:22am
Then you'll have to hide the navigation pane.