Vista ~ Introduction |
Performance technologies! The breadcrumb bar introduces an entirely new way of navigating in Windows. It replaces the plodding, sub-folder-based, dig-down method of yore with shortcut jumps. While it incorporates the now ancient DOS heritage of paths, it owes more to the Web’s hyperlinks. The breadcrumb bar provides a visual indication of the path you’ve followed to get to your current location. Take a look at Figure 1, which shows an XP path above a Vista breadcrumb trail.
Figure 1. The XP path and an equivalent Vista breadcrumb trail. (Click the image to see a full-size screenshot.) At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be too much difference: The drive name (C:\) is omitted and XP’s backslashes are replaced by arrows in Vista, but otherwise the paths look fairly similar. (Note, if you can’t see the pathname in XP, open a folder, click View Menu -> Toolbars and select Address Bar). This apparent similarity masks two important differences:
Figure 2. An alternative route to the same folder. Breadcrumb navigation has become increasingly popular, not only in operating systems and applications, but also on the Web. In Vista, you’ll find breadcrumb navigation in file open and save dialogs as well as in Explorer windows. Breadcrumb navigationThe real power of the breadcrumb bar is its interactivity. Click any of the “crumbs” to jump immediately to that location. For instance, if you click Personal in our example breadcrumb you’ll jump straight to the Rosetta > Documents > Personal folder. Click the arrow to the right of a crumb and you’ll see a drop-down list of sub-folders, with the currently opened folder highlighted in bold text. Click any item in the drop-down list to open it. The arrow to the left of the first crumb in the trail displays a list of root locations: your user folder, the desktop, Public folder, Control Panel, Network, Computer, and Recycle Bin. To the left of that, beside the browser-style backwards and forwards buttons, is a drop-down arrow providing a list of Recent Pages; that is, locations you’ve visited recently. Click any item in the list to return there.
Breadcrumb navigation provides instant jumps between your current location, nearby locations and most major waypoints on your computer. Clicking the arrow at the right-hand end of the breadcrumb bar opens the Previous Locations list. It shows the pathnames or addresses of folders, Control Panel applets and web sites you’ve opened. Clicking any item opens that item. Crumb tipsIf you’ve wormed your way down through multiple folders and can no longer see the full breadcrumb trail, you’ll notice a chevron replacing the left-most arrow. Click the chevron to reveal the starting crumbs in your trail, with a list of root locations beneath. If you’d like to know the actual pathname to your current location, click in any blank space on the breadcrumb bar and you’ll see an old-style path. Click anywhere in the folder window to redisplay the breadcrumbs. To use that pathname in a document or shortcut, right-click the breadcrumb bar and choose Copy Address As Text from the pop-up menu; this copies the full path to the clipboard. A more interesting, if somewhat obscurely named, right-click option is Copy Address. You can use this option to copy an entire folder from one location to another, or to create a quick desktop shortcut. For example, try this:
Breadcrumbs for XPIf you like the sound of breadcrumb navigation but you haven’t made the move to Vista, a couple of utilities give the same flexibility to Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows. One is Explorer Breadcrumbs. The other is Folder Pilot, a rather more sophisticated utility which provides breadcrumb navigation and more.
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