Microsoft Official Video Shows Improved File Management UI (Copy, Move, Rename, Delete) in Windows 8

Since when Microsoft has launched official “Building Windows 8” blog, the company is trying post more and more interesting details about Windows 8 regularly.

First Microsoft announced about USB 3.0 support in Windows 8:

Windows 8 Will Come With Support for USB 3.0, Microsoft Confirms

And today Microsoft has made another exciting announcement about an excellent feature in Windows 8.

Windows 8 will come with a completely new redesigned file copy, move, rename and delete dialog box. According to Microsoft, they have improved the file management functionality in Windows 8 and the file copy/move dialog box UI has been changed completely.

Here is what the official announcement says:

Copying, moving, renaming, and deleting are far and away the most heavily used features within Windows Explorer, representing 50% of total command usage (based on Windows 7 telemetry data).

There are some pretty cluttered and confusing parts of the Windows 7 copy experience. This is particularly true when people need to deal with files and folders that have the same file names, in what we call file name collisions.

We clearly have an opportunity to make some improvements in the experience of high-volume copying, in dealing with file name collisions, and in assuring the successful completion of copy jobs.

In Windows 8, we have three main goals for our improvements to the copy experience:

• One place to manage all copy jobs: Create one unified experience for managing and monitoring ongoing copy operations.
• Clear and concise: Remove distractions and give people the key information they need.
• User in control: Put people in control of their copy operations.

Based on these goals, we made four major improvements to the copy experience.

Redesigned Copy/Move Dialog Box:

First, we’ve consolidated the copy experience. You can now review and control all the Explorer copy jobs currently executing in one combined UI. Windows 8 presents all pending copy jobs in this single dialog, saving you from having to navigate through multiple floating dialogs looking for the one you need.

Ability to Pause/Resume File Operations:

Next, we’ve added the ability to pause, resume, and stop each copy operation currently underway. This gives you control over which copy jobs will complete first. You can also click any of the source or destination folders while the copy operation is taking place and open up those folders.

To support this new ability to prioritize and decide, we’ve added a detailed view with a real-time throughput graph. Now each copy job shows the speed of data transfer, the transfer rate trend, and how much data in left to transfer. While this is not designed for benchmarking, in many cases it can provide a quick and easy way to assess what is going on for a particular job.

Here you can see three copy jobs underway:

Estimated Time Remaining:

We’re anticipating that many of you are going to want to know what we’ve done to improve the accuracy of the estimated time remaining for a copy to complete.

Estimating the time remaining to complete a copy is nearly impossible to do with any precision because there are many unpredictable and uncontrollable variables involved – for instance, how much network bandwidth will be available for the length of the copy job? Will your anti-virus software spin up and start scanning files? Will another application need to access the hard drive? Will the user start another copy job?

Rather than invest a lot of time coming up with a low confidence estimate that would be only slightly improved over the current one, we 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.

Conflict Resolution:

Our last major set of improvements simplify and clean up the experience for resolving file name collisions, which we also refer to as “conflict resolution.” At this point we can admit that the current experience can be rather confusing. People don’t know which files are which, and they find it challenging to find the information they need to make a decision.

Our new design is much more clear, concise, and efficient, providing a much more visible and actionable approach to conflict resolution. All the files from the source are on the left. All the files in the target location with file name collisions are on the right. The screen layout is easy to understand and shows you the critical information for all the collisions, front and center in one dialog.

If you need to know even more about the conflicting files, you can hover over the thumbnail image to see the file path or double-click it to open it from here.

Finally, in addition to these big improvements, we’ve also done a thorough scrub and removed many of the confirmation dialogs that you’ve told us are annoying or feel redundant (i.e. “are you sure you want to move this file to the recycle bin?” or “are you sure you want to merge these folders?”) to create a quieter, less distracting experience.

All of this adds up to building a significantly improved copy experience, one that is unified, concise, and clear, and which puts you in control of your experience.

Its an excellent move from Microsoft. It clearly shows how much efforts Microsoft is putting in developing Windows 8. Good going MS…

UPDATE: Our reader “MuTz777” noticed the new Start ORB in Windows 8 video. The new Start ORB is shown in the beginning of the video.

Windows 7 users can enjoy this new Start ORB using following tutorial:

Get New Windows 8 Start ORB (Start Button) in Windows 7