Admitting that file management or the "copy jobs" feature now in Windows could be confusing, Alex Simons, a program management director on Microsoft's Windows engineering group, yesterday revealed four enhancements destined to surface in Windows 8.
Contributing towards the latest installment of Microsoft's ongoing "Building Windows 8" blog, Simons said which copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files are the most heavily used functions in Windows Explorer, accounting for 50 percent of all file management duties.
But studies done by Microsoft confirmed that parts of the Windows 7 copy experience could be "cluttered and confusing. " This is especially true if you're are copying or moving files and folders using the same names or copying or moving multiple files one after the additional.
To offer a more user-friendly file management experience in Windows 8, Microsoft created three goals: 1) create a single place to manage and monitor just about all files being copied; 2) remove distractions and give people just the information they require; and 3) put people in more control of their copy operations.
Because as result, Windows 8 users will see four new features in the upcoming operating-system designed to simplify the chore of copying and moving files.
First, within past versions of Windows, a separate progress dialog box would pop up for every new file that you were copying or moving. This could sometimes lead to dozens of different file copy boxes floating around the screen. Windows 8 consolidates the process into one dialog box for all files being copied or moved where one can more easily view and control each individual file.
Second, users will have the ability to stop, pause, and resume each file being copied or moved and view the origin or destination folder while the process is running.
Third, Microsoft's estimates on how long a file will take to copy or move will always be something of a joke, which Simons even admitted in his blog. We have all see file copy messages that keep changing the estimate dramatically, jumping from something similar to 5 minutes to 1 hour and then to 15 minutes and then to an hour.
Instead of guessing how long a file will take in order to copy, Windows 8 will offer a new graph detailing the data move speed, the transfer rate trend, and how much data is left in order to transfer. Though that sounds more complicated than a simple estimate, it promises to become more accurate.
Fourth, people can sometimes be confused by filename conflicts or even collisions, which occur when the same filename exists in both the source and destination folders throughout a copy or move. For Windows 8, Microsoft has redesigned the box that appears during a file collision, which Simons feels will be more efficient and simpler to understand.
As one final tweak that should please a lot of individuals, Microsoft is doing away with some of the redundant and often irritating dialog boxes that appear when managing files, such as, "Are you sure you need to delete this file? " or "Are you sure you want to combine these folders? "
All of the new file management improvements add as much as "building a significantly improved copy experience, one that is unified, concise, as well as clear, and which puts you in control of your experience, " Simons additional.