In anticipation of the Microsoft's September BUILD conference, the flow of information about Windows 8 is building. In a Wednesday blog post, Microsoft's director of program management, Alex Simons, offered a glimpse of commonly used features that are due for an overhaul—the dialogs that control file moving, copying, renaming, and deleting.
In an introduction to the post, Window head honcho Steven Sinofsky wrote that these actions comprise "one of the most used features, and one we have not improved substantially in a long time."
On the rationale for the redesign, Sinofsky went on to say that "with the increasing amount of local storage measured in terabytes, containing photos (in multiple formats and very large files), music, and video, these common operations are being taxed in new ways." He also noted that there's been consistent user feedback requesting changes.
Microsoft knows through its "telemetry"—Windows usage data sent back to the company—that these file operations account for half of all Windows command usage and 20 percent of them take longer than 2 minutes to complete. Simons admitted that the existing version of Windows Explorer doesn't excel at handling large or multiple simultaneous operations. He outlined the three overriding goals for the changes as: place to manage all copy jobs; clear and concise; and user in control.
Probably the most visible change to the copy and moving processes mentioned is that multiple operations will all appear in one dialog, and you'll be able to pause and resume them individually. This could be useful if you have a couple of large video files you're transferring, but want one to finish before another. A "More details" button will even show graphs of each transfer's throughput. Though some skeptics may note that the Macintosh has presented multiple file transfers in a single dialog for years, that dialog doesn't offer the options coming to Windows 8, since it doesn't break out info on each separate transfer operations or allow pausing.
While Simons claimed that anticipating time remaining for these actions accurately is "nearly impossible," he assured us that the team "focused on presenting the information we were confident about in a useful and compelling way. This makes the most reliable information we have available to you so you can make more informed decisions."
Another big help in the new system concerned filename "collisions." If you tried to copy a file to a folder that already had a file with the same name, Windows presented a rather confusing set of choices about which ones to keep. Currently, a user gets three choices in case of such a collision: Copy and Replace; Don't Copy; and Copy, but keep both files. The file you are copying will be renamed. In Windows 8, these choices will be replaced by thumbnails for all source and target files with checkboxes letting you choose whether to keep them.
Finally, Simons noted that the copying and deleting experience will be smoother thanks to the removal of "confirmation dialogs that you've told us are annoying or feel redundant." These include things like "Are you sure you want to move this file to the recycle bin?"
For more, see Windows 8: What We Know So Far. To see the new copy and move features in action, watch a demonstration from Simons in the video below.
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