Windows Vista Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Scrolling

Windows Vista Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Scrolling stets new standards for scrolling capabilities. With the Windows Explorer in Windows XP, scrolling through the Folders Menu implied both a horizontal and a vertical bar. The opened folders expanded both left and right of the little generous viewing space of the folder tree, and the horizontal scrolling bar had to be moved accordingly to compensate for the interfaces' shortcomings. Well - as Long Zheng of the IStartedSomething points out - this will no longer be the case in Vista, as the upcoming operating system from Microsoft introduces Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Scrolling. In short: no horizontal scrolling bar.

Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Scrolling is, according to a pending patent filled with the US Patent & Trademark Office on October 26, 2006: "a system and method of automatically dynamically scrolling content in a dimension to enhance user navigation and display of a relevant node is disclosed. In one example, when a user scrolls vertically to a node in a folder tree control where the node/folder name is not visible, the folder tree view may be automatically dynamically scrolled horizontally such that the full name of the folder is viewable. The automatic dynamic scrolling alleviates the effort and stress related to requiring a user to manually scroll a view in two dimensions in a tree control."

Lyon K.F. Wong, Cornelis K. Van Dok, Colin R. Anthony and Stephan Hoefnagels from Microsoft are the inventors of the Dynamic multi-dimensional scrolling technology.