This UI concept seems to be gaining in popularity. Jira 5 has a similar (though less powerful) option-completion action bar that you can pull up with a shortcut

This UI concept seems to be gaining in popularity. Jira 5 has a similar (though less powerful) option-completion action bar that you can pull up with a shortcut when viewing an Issue. I've been considering adopting a similar concept for a complex enterprise application that I maintain where the number of possible actions on a certain page is huge.