Any Windows user knows that it's the small changes that make a big difference! THANK YOU!

Wow! Looks cool. Keep up the good work.

The explorer UI in graph view has a very flat chrome. Look way better than the legacy Vista chrome.

What about that problem where you're copying hundreds of files and there's a problem somewhere and instead of telling you the problem and what you can do to fix it, the whole thing just stops, and you have to manually find the problem, sort it out, and then start the whole copy procedure again. That would be good to be fixed also.

The yellow "pause" color looks like a slow transfer more than a paused transfer

Nice!  I do hope with get a cleaner chrome though, one that matches the Metro solid color look instead the fake glass we're currently seeing.

These new dialogs look good, I am looking forward to a better experience with file operations :)

The 'Choose Files' dialog is a UX disaster...

Please Please display all the copy 'error dialogs' after the copying has completed .So I don't have to sit infront of the machine all the time.

I loooove the centered title bar text.

I really like the new copy dialogs including the detailed transfer speed information etc. Keep up the good work and the innovative enhancements.

Kinda agree with x9... The dialgoue has no indication why it is being presented (unlike the Win 7 version which tells you there is a file with the same name.. nicely put..simple and easy to grasp). "The copied file will have a number added to its name"... SERIOUSLY?!! Thats a disaster of a warning. Just ask a non power user (ask a non geeky wife, kid etc what sense it makes to them) ...  Make the UX guys work harder on that dialgoue.. I prefer the current dialogue.. and I am trying hard to think in terms of KISS not as a geek.

It is getting a new level, it's awesome the new Windows 8 and every change too! I Hope to have beta for users soon!

@gawicks

> Please Please display all the copy 'error dialogs' after the copying

> has completed .So I don't have to sit infront of the machine all the time.

Yes!  I second this!  This would be much nicer to have than the moving throughput charts.

With the conflict files dialog box, what happens if there are a ton of conflicting files? Is there a limit on how many files appear on the dialog box?

I think every time I have a file name conflict I always want to replace the existing files with the new one.  The default UX seems to suggest that replacing and keeping the existing files are equally common tasks.  I'm curious if my usage pattern is consistent with the telemetry data.

To add to my previous comment.. I cared enough to ask a couple of folks in the room who are not geeks but use Win 7 almost daily.. a fair bit.

They did not understand what "a number added to its name" would do and what it exactly meant. Also, had it not been for pictures (so it was word docs or other file types) they would have no clue that the dialgoue is presented because of a name conflict. In their words "i guessed it was files with the same name because the thumbnails loooked the same"

Please make copying LARGE files into and out of zip archives reliable -- it doesn't even have to be fast, I just want the MD5 hashes of the large files going into the zip be the same as when I later extract them.  On Windows 7 I have to use a third-party zip tool to make it work right.

What about gray instead of yellow for the paused copy charts?

As the dialog box appears now, there is no one-click option that replicates the existing "Copy, but keep both files" in Windows 7.

I think a check box for keeping both version of the files in conflict would keep you from taking a step backwards.

I like seeing these new features as they are being developed! I use TeraCopy and look forward to not having to install it on Windows 8

Could you add an option somewhere to always show "more details" by default?  Or make it an registry entry or something, please?

I know this will make things a little on the "too complicated" side, but would you consider an option to make it a queue system, i.e. a check box to "Do the action one at a time."  So the user does not have to pause and unpause manually?

yellow is confusing. it should be grey when its paused to show its not active. yellow is more like yellow, orange, green - the colors indicating the health/speed of something

The concept looks quite good, but what doesn't look good is Aero. It looks dated (it is a Vista interface after all) and I really hope there will be enough courage in MS to replace it with Metro throughout Windows. I think that would make a much larger difference and an incentive for people to upgrade from W7 than these small improvements. Talking about small improvements, the thing that annoys me the most in current Windows Explorer is the need to click into each pane to be able to scroll it. Are there any plans to make panes scrollable on hover on non-touch screen machines?

this is nice, i wish i could get rid of full row select. it's really annoying trying to drag files to a folder, when only sub folders are visible, and trying to find white space to drop the files i'm copying so they don't end up in one of the sub folders.

can't tell you how many times this happens, then i have to open folders or search to find where they went.

i have a nice powerpoint presentation, if you're interested.

Also have to say i agree with @x9. Maybe instead of clicking those checkboxes, for each conflict you can just choose the file you want to keep. The checkboxes are cluttering the interface and need precision when clicking them - so if you have 20 conflicting files you would spend a while clicking them...

How about some more smarts in the conflict resolver?

No need to display a thumbnail if:

1) the files have the same name and

2) they have the same size and

3) their checksums match (or you could do a byte-by-byte comparison)

My time is more valuable than my computer's - let it do some crunching beforehand to avoid asking me to decide something obvious.

Very nice!  Those are some improvements that many Windows users will be able to benefit from right away.  

I thought there were some flaws in the dialog. The colors seem wrong in my opinion -  a pause should be more of a red (think stop lights). Here's a (very quick!) mockup I made that shows some of the changes that should be made.

http://yfrog.com/gz7v0qp

Holy crap - you're seriously going to stop asking me if I'm sure I want to recycle a file and just move it to the recycle bin! Yes! Finally! That has been the most annoying dialog ever!

@schneider

i agree, when watching the video without sound i thought that yellow was saying it was going slow

of course you would quickly learn this is not the case but to me gray would be a better colour

I agree with Oleg. Perhaps just clicking on the image you want to keep would highlight it (draw a semi-transparent colored fill-rectangle around it), which would also make it much easier to verify which one you wanted while skimming back over the list.

This is great! I do a lot with USBs and stuff, so I'm going to love this.

Please friendly to

1. Touch friendly = easy to operate on Touch Device.

2. Clowd friendly = async on slow network.

3. Mobile friendly = pause/resume on wi-fi / 3G network.

4. Big friendly = easy to use over 10,000 files, over 100GB files.

Great stuff!

How about you fix this first: answers.microsoft.com/.../50a81b05-da98-4d55-821d-55ffbbd0e998

Nice! But I would like to see cleaner chrome as well. Like in the Metro UI. Perhaps a choice between a dark and a light color. At least in the dialog boxes. Keep up the good work  :)

Keep up the good work :)

I got a question, what about Metro UI? Shouldn't you update your dialogs to match the prepared Metro UI (I really like the style in my HTC HD7 phone)? These updated copy dialogs looks to me like W7 dialogs with little tuning. I would expect something more in these revolutionary Windows ;)

I like it!

Can you please make the choose files more detailed?

Also instead of the checkboxes can't you just select the image instead just like opening a image base link on HTML?

Hmm... My comment didn't seem to get through.

Anyways, I agree that paused operations should be red. Think of it like a traffic light, where green is go, yellow means to only continue if you are in the intersection and red is stop.

Also, what about a "mass apply" option for conflict resolution? There is no way to say "Replace with {newer, older, smaller, larger}" files. Also, what if there are hundreds of conflicts which need resolution? That will be a huge pain in the rear-end.

What about ZIP support? While there are options such as WinZip and 7-zip that is still no excuse for Windows Explorer's implementation to be horribly slow. If Explorer is going to support ZIP's natively it should be able to do it quickly. Extracting ZIP's with the built-in extractor is just plain slow.

You should be able to click on the image thumb and/or file icon instead of the checkbox in order to select it. Is this currently how things are? It wasn't shown in the video.

Or what about ditching the checkboxes and just have an outline or background colour applied to the selected copy?

Looks like a great improvement from W7. Good work!

Your blog hasn't addressed some users concerns regarding copying files to USB sticks with multiple copies in progress at once. Currently (Win7) if you copy say three files to a USB stick the transfer will run at nearly the USB sticks max write speed - or there about. Each file is copied one after the other.

However, if you copy the same three files at the same time (using three different copy dialogues, starting one copy directly after the first and so on) the total transfer speed is no where near the same -- So coping the same three files takes way longer. Windows should handle this situation. Devices that cannot handle multiple concurrent writes should have their copies put into a que rather than attempting all concurrently.

A useful feature would be for the copying not to choke on a file, but for other files to keep transferring in the background, while a non-obstructive error message pops up telling me that some files need help.

That way I could transfer copy lots of files, walk away and when I come back the dialog has not choked on file 3 and completely stopped, but rather has copied all the files except the few files needing attention.

File copying mech. is simply borrowed from linux.... :-V

Great job! It looks fantastic!

Nice! now implement queue :).. Same as in totalcmd ;)

These changes look well worth having.

There is an issue I regularly strike, that you mention as a current issue: "...  Explorer isn’t optimized for ... executing multiple copy jobs concurrently."

I often find myself wanting to move or copy several sets of folders simultaneously - for example, I plug my phone in, and want to get the latest photos and latest sound recordings off it. Or move older documents and music and photos from my laptop to archival storage. I currently have to do these copies one set of folders at a time, as doing multiple jobs simultaneously takes many times longer that each one individually. Presumably the copy jobs run in ignorance of each other and cause the drives involved to thrash.

I'd be curious to say what telemetry tells you, but I suspect there are many people wanting to perform simultaneous copies in this fashion, who currently have the annoying copy, wait, copy, wait, etc experience.

I see that you've consider this issue as you show us "And here you can see how the speed of file transfer increases substantially when two of the copy jobs are paused:"

Which is a better user story than we used to have, but still painful, as it involves manual intervention, which if you have several copy jobs you wish to do taking  30 minutes or more each is a nasty user experience.

I'd ask you to please consider building some form of queueing into the copy system. Especially as you have taken the first step, and already have all currently running file operations centrally managed. Enhancing what's there with intelligence to

- only allow one operation per device(*),

- sort the operations so the most efficient operations (or fastest operations?) happen first, whilst allowing as many devices to be working as possible

- allow the user to drag and drop the operations to override that ordering if they have their own preferences

wouldn't be trivial, it wouldn't be impossible, and would provide a fantastic user experience for those of us shuffling multiple sets of large files between multiple devices.

Thanks for your consideration, and the chance to provide feedback like this.

(*) unless the device doesn't suffer from trashing? I've never come across one, but I don't know that much.

Would like to see a new visual style that is squared off and glass - Metro Glass, can see this in detailed view, please UI team, create a super stylish UI for desktop.

Finally! I hope it covers gracefully the case where the target filename is too long. Ideally it would cover this by allowing arbitrarily long filenames.

Agree with @Hypernova, please add a "queuing" system in file operation, as doing multiple file operations with HDD will kill the machine.

The orb is gone! (at least at the start it was)

The orb is gone! (at least at the start it was)

Will be easy to copy multiple movies to my laptop :) Well..but I doubt it will make the system slow down tremendously.

I am a long time TeraCopy user as the various versions of Windows have never been able to provide a reliable experience for transferring large files over a network, even a fast local network. It is great to see you are addressing some of the shortcomings and I hope it includes the following:

1. Automatic retry (resume) mechanism

2. Copy operations are paused by default when another copy operation to that volume is already in progress (your own tests show that this will improve throughput).

I agree with some of the other comments about the new conflict resolution UI. My first impression is that it is not clear at all. I wouldn't wish that screen on a non power user.

Keep up the good work though.

You know when you start a big copy job and realize that you are doing it over the wireless.  So you grab a network cable and plug it in.

Does the file copy know to utilize the faster connection now?  Perhaps after you pause the copy and then resume it?

Will it be possible to pause the copy operation and resume it after reboot/sleep/hibernate? The scenario is following - sometimes I have to copy many/big files, but have no time to wait for completion. I want to be able to shutdown the PC and it will resume the copy after restart. Will be also great to have an option to shutdown the PC after copy operation completes.

None of the interfaces shown seem suitable for touch use. What about that?

I remember the time thing when it comes to copy, i observed the differences in all releases since windows 98 it has been improving and this one seems more compelling to me, Good Work. looks like Windows Team is working very hard to kick all.

Please install and try supercopier first (supercopier.sfxteam.org) then make their features basic stuff in Windows 8. Then you could talk about copy management.

Yes, remove the orb please - it is dated, just the flag is right! Remember the correct use of padding or margin on these things, the flag as the same size it is now without the orb is best - I noticed the repositioning of the 'More Details' text to be vertically aligned and have better left margin form the sprite - seems someone is thinking about the details. I agree that errors should be dealt with at the end of a file copy especially on large jobs, I hate coming back to my desk an hour later to find it has stopped at 30% for the sake of a file.

I'd like to echo Jawkins' comment. "Keep both and rename" needs to stay. I organize pictures by folder and don't really care about file names. So, having (1), (2)... appended to the file name is no problem. In fact, it's preferred because it allows me to copy files more quickly.

Along with double clicking the thumbnail to preview the file, I suggest that hovering over a thumbnail on the 'Conflict Resolution Dialog' will also give you a larger view of the image.

FINALLY focus on some KEY areas here that have in my opinion been ignored for way too long. *Pat pat*.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

Bring back the .GIF animation support in picture viewer of Windows

What about merging this dialog with the IE Downoad Manager?

If we think about it, downloading a file is very similar to copy a file over the network. You get the same challenges about limited bandwidth, concurrent downloads,...

Would it be too much to ask to have a key combination for 'Invert Selection'?

Wauw....this looks very cool! Can't wait for the BETA to arrive!!!

Sometimes trying to delete or modify a file in any other way causes Windows to report that the file cannot be modified due to it being in use and offer to try again.That is a good behavior but naturally, Windows should assume that user's wishes are more important than those of the process that have file in use. I hope that Windows 8 team will address this issue and give user more control over his files and will ensure that file handles will not get corrupted.

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions. Please keep them coming.  To answer a few questions that people have posed:

@gawicks - conflicts are all queed to the end of the copy job. So we finish all the copies that don't have name collisions, and then ask you to resolve the remaining conflicts.

@Hypernova - the "More details" is sticky - once you open it, all your future copy jobs will show more details until you close it.

From the comments it sounds like my post might be a bit confusing in terms of how often users will see the conflict resolution dialog. If you watch the video, you'll see that when we detect a name collision the first dialog is pretty simple and has only three options (replace, skip or choose). We expect that in the large majority of cases people will just pick replace. It's only if you choose to choose for each file that you get to the resolution dialog.

Also thanks for the feedback on colors. We're still working on final color schemes.

Regards,

Alex

Thank you for investing time and effort in this crucial area. From my point of view there are two thing's that I would further improve: 1) Altthouhg the "conflicting files" dialog looks far more clean than previous ones, I would simply rename the actions that are on the top of the list to "Overwrite files in <location>" and "Keep files in <location>". 2) this one hasn't been mentioned in your blog post, but please make explorer UAC aware! It is really cumbersome to get multiple confirmation dialogs(even when you run as an administrator on a server). Thank you, Christian

* Checkboxes are small. Just click the image. Bigger target.

* How will this integrate with the tablet / tiles UI shown off at All Things D? The big question on a lot of people's minds is whether it's possible to maintain the touch-friendly (and simple) interface without dropping into a traditional Windows UI.

Looks good. What about the option from 7 where you could select 'do this for the next n conflicts'?

For example, if doing a simple backup of 100s of images by copying the content of a directory to another directory in which we have 10 new images.

Then I do not want to have to check 100s of checkboxes in order to leave existing files 'as is'.

A long time wish list as windows user to allow to pause copy paste operations.

Seems very intresting, do this will get backport to windows 7 using SP2 in near future???

Good improvements. Just one thing though: I am not sure removing the merge warning was a good idea. It is always nice to know when I am merging contents of folders.

@Steven Sinofsky

Thats cool. Yesterday i thought about that and posted that in the USB3.0 post and now i saw this video and  you already implent such a feauture.

Great work. and progress.

It really bugged me when he hit 'more details', then had to drag the window back up to the center of the screen, because the details didn't fit in view.

Will it be possible to pause the copy operation and resume it after reboot/sleep/hibernate? The scenario is following - sometimes I have to copy many/big files, but have no time to wait for completion. I want to be able to shutdown the PC and it will resume the copy after restart. Will be also great to have an option to shutdown the PC after copy operation completes.

@AlexSi So if I choose "More Detail" once, and every actions is done.  Then, next time I do another copy/move job (let's say after a restart), the file transfer dialog will appear with More Detail by default?  Or do you mean it's only sticky until the dialog is closed?  If it's the former, then that's great!  If it's the latter, though, then please make an option to make it permanent.  And thanks for you answer.

Could the guys working on the user interface please remove the focus rectangle dots? It's about the worst thing in WIndow's UI these days. Most UI elements where this is plagued already have a nice blue focus image to tell the user that this control is focused therefor making it redundant. If it needs to be there for other reasons, could you at least update it. Perhaps a solid light blue line. That old black dots thing is just awful, inconsistent, and outdated. It needs to either go or be revised.

Will you be bringing back the Power Calculator? Have to use compatibility mode to run on Windows 8 now,

I'm assuming there's no plans to add any type of CRC validation to the copy process (think TeraCopy with validate turned on)?

@SamStephens I Love You! Read this comment. Please.

These changes look well worth having.

There is an issue I regularly strike, that you mention as a current issue: "... Explorer isn’t optimized for ... executing multiple copy jobs concurrently."

I often find myself wanting to move or copy several sets of folders simultaneously - for example, I plug my phone in, and want to get the latest photos and latest sound recordings off it. Or move older documents and music and photos from my laptop to archival storage. I currently have to do these copies one set of folders at a time, as doing multiple jobs simultaneously takes many times longer that each one individually. Presumably the copy jobs run in ignorance of each other and cause the drives involved to thrash.

I'd be curious to say what telemetry tells you, but I suspect there are many people wanting to perform simultaneous copies in this fashion, who currently have the annoying copy, wait, copy, wait, etc experience.

I see that you've consider this issue as you show us "And here you can see how the speed of file transfer increases substantially when two of the copy jobs are paused:"

Which is a better user story than we used to have, but still painful, as it involves manual intervention, which if you have several copy jobs you wish to do taking 30 minutes or more each is a nasty user experience.

I'd ask you to please consider building some form of queueing into the copy system. Especially as you have taken the first step, and already have all currently running file operations centrally managed. Enhancing what's there with intelligence to

- only allow one operation per device(*),

- sort the operations so the most efficient operations (or fastest operations?) happen first, whilst allowing as many devices to be working as possible

- allow the user to drag and drop the operations to override that ordering if they have their own preferences

wouldn't be trivial, it wouldn't be impossible, and would provide a fantastic user experience for those of us shuffling multiple sets of large files between multiple devices.

Thanks for your consideration, and the chance to provide feedback like this.

(*) unless the device doesn't suffer from trashing? I've never come across one, but I don't know that much.

I also vote for gray as the color for the paused file transfer. I think red is too "worrisome" a color to be used for paused transfers.

People complain about the dialog box asking 'are you sure you want to delete this file?'- until they accidentally delete a file, and then they appreciate it. Those 'annoying' dialog boxes have saved my files from accidental deletion more than once. Be careful what you wish for...

People complain about the dialog box asking 'are you sure you want to delete this file?'- until they accidentally delete a file, and then they appreciate it. Those 'annoying' dialog boxes have saved my files from accidental deletion more than once. Be careful what you wish for...

Very nice.

To people - take a look at the video. It answers many of your questions and shows UI that wasn't showcased in the blog post.

Looks good. I find the pause feature quit neat. An extension to that would be able auto-resume (or some sort of queuing mechanism). Maybe have an option "Resume after..." then selecting which file to resume after.

Very cool stuff.

It would be very cool to have advanced renaming functionality which allows users to select multiple files and rename them with a Pattern, RegEx etc...

I really like the unification of windows/dialogue boxes, so as FremyCompany mentions with IE downloads, what about other copy/move processes, can they (and developers in general hook into this?

I hope so, because this could really eliminate a lot of clutter, and most users (in my experience) are very poor at generalizing concepts if they appear in different contexts. Look at how copy/paste works for pretty much any text editing now, I'd love it if you can make the same conceptual unity work for file operations.  So, if copy/move operations go to one place it would help casual users' conceptual understanding of various tasks.

It's great to centralise the copy / moves on a single windows but as written above, it must include a queue.

In fact the default behaviour should be a queue, let me explain my idea. User typically don't want to lunch multiples copy / move at the same time, what they want is lunch multiples actions, go get a coffee and come back to seen all the job finished.

When you lunch multiples action on the same set of disk it take much more time to finish that if you queue them.

Windows explorer should work like IE, allow x (let say 2) action on the same physical disk (not partition) at the same time, and after the x is reached queue any job added. of curse the user should be able to force start a job.

Looks just like copy/paste embeded in KDE since 4.0.

This may be resolved in Windows 7 - still using XP - but reserving space in the destination dir before copy is started might be an idea. Often I've started a cut/copy of a large amount of files that fails before finishing because I've run out of disk space mid-way. At least roll back the cut/copy!

Later,

Ivan

Yes, I definately think that a queue would be vital, so that multiple copy jobs occur one after the other, to optimise speeds and remove drive thrashing.

Looking at the UX for choosing which files to overwrite - aiming for a tiny checkbox is not easy, so I trust you'll simply be able to press/click on the whole thumnail/icon area.

Finally finally finally!

Good start but can still be much better.

The "choose files" dialog is a nightmare for any job with more than 3 files.

1. Checkboxes are small and annoying

2. No batch-decision (i.e only keep newer files, only keep larger files), check the filezilla conflicting-file-dialog www.artfuldancer.com/.../FTP_FileZilla_03upload2.gif it might no be so fancy but the options are really powerful yet easy to understand.

3. No option for "keep both files but add (1) to the new copy".

4a. Ability to open each file directly from the dialog to study details of it

4b. You could even add a button that says "compare in external program" that opens up a diff-tool. I'm not asking for complete source control built into explorer but even non-programmers should really learn about diffing. (even Word has a built in compare-function!).

To be honest it feels like your bolting on bling bling and simplifications instead of redefining the whole copy-file-paradigm. This could have been done much better. Why should i have to care about confilcts anyway? Just save all versions of the file and create a nice interface for this instead (*ehum* OSX time machine *cough*). Seriously, even my mom uses dropbox on a day-to-day basis, people have more than one disk and a usb-stick nowadays. You have to rethink the the whole concept of file management. This is your flagship OS for the future, not some third party explorer-enhancement.

This is good... Especially for me because i'm transferring large amount of data from ext hdd to pc and reverse.

Also, it would be nice if there is auto-rename option, especially for photos.

Windows copy / paste does not work well for copying large files over the network. If the copy is interrupted you have to start over. Please fix this.

Regarding the color of the paused copies I think red would be a bad choice, because when it would be red I would instantly think there was an error during file copy. The color I would prefer for paused copies would be gray.

Nevertheless - yay!!! We can pause file copies!!! Good work!

Besides that I'm totally with @Eric: please fix this annoying behavior of Windows Explorer!

answers.microsoft.com/.../50a81b05-da98-4d55-821d-55ffbbd0e998

connect.microsoft.com/.../bug-when-expanding-folders-in-explorer-server-2008-r2-and-windows-7

hey guys great work... but why not queue in the first place instead of making the user pause actions and resme? ...or at least give the user an option to auto resume after the first transfer is complete

It's really nice that you do something like this, I especially like the idea of having all the copy operations in one window. But, it solves the problem that noone has. Really, copying, moving and deleting are very good already and you shouldn't spend time on fixing them.

If you want to focus on real issues, look at www.windows7taskforce.com and fix all the UI inconsistencies. Get rid of icons from windows 95. Make windows are resizable. It's not the 90's anymore, you know.

And please, please, create a modern terminal, like there are in linux of mac os x. LCI in windows is ugly, you cannot resize it freely and hasn't change a bit since windows 95. A disgrace.

I really like the new copy/move dialog, and you can make it even better if its something like this - "All file management dialogs under one window but each file management dialog having it's own process, so if one dialog gets really jammed then other dialog with isolated processes are not affected". I am not sure if I explained it good but I hope you get my point. Thanks

Speaking of Windows Explorer, copy, paste, and all that jazz; when will you guys implement "tabs" in Windows Explorer. And when will we have dual (or multiple) panes. Do we have pay money to get basic functionality? Why can't you do things as simple as that? Why?

Looks definitely like a big improvement to the Win7 copy dialogs! I would change the window title, however, to indicate more that these are file operations initiated from Windows Explorer. "Actions" is too generic imho.

Using red as the color for the stopped copy operation is a bad idea in my opinion, as red not only means "STOP" but more often "ERROR". It also attracts attention (this is the idea with the traffic lights) which isn't the goal here. I'd go for gray as some others have suggested. Red could be used to signal an error as it is done in Windows 7.

Admittedly @Rafał I remember www.windows7taskforce.com did bring up a lot of UI inconsistencies and silly things that should be resolved, look there and draft a sensible list of out-dated UI elements to be updated for Windows 8.

Very nice work. I don’t like the “If you select both versions, the copied file will have a number added to its name” that sound confusing compared to the old “The file you are coping will be renamed “filename (2).JPG”.

I understand that Windows will be mainly a mouse-and-keyboard (or pen-based) OS but, as some people says, this windows seems very difficult to use with a touch devices. Have you tried this windows on a pen-and-touch Tablet PC like the Dell Latitude XT2, the HP Elitebook 2740p, the Fujitsu Lifebook T901 or Asus Eee Slate EP121? How do you think that the user experience will be on a Microsoft-style Tablet PC?

I like what I see with the throughput graphs. I hope that more detailed telemetry dialogs show up elsewhere in the system, where it makes sense. This would make a power user feel like one again.

:D, You people at Microsoft needed aprox 6 years to implement simple feature, that's available in every Unix box and now you're saying "We invented the wheel"

You could use pushbuttons containing the file details and preview, instead of small checkboxes next to them. That would give a larger active area for users to click on; and the default choices (overwrite, I guess) could already be depressed.

Instead of presenting the file details as what's there at the moment, you could present them as a preview of what the user will get if they press "Continue" now: including the resulting filename.

If added clarity's needed about files being discarded, then some kind of overlay (a red cross or trash can or something of the sort) could indicate files that are going to be lost. The combination of that and push buttons is starting to sound a bit icky, but I'm sure that a more talented UI designer with longer to spend on it could come up with something along the same lines but better than the picture in my head...

Dear ALL, Dear Windows8 Team,

Here are some suggestions which could be implemented in order to improve user experience...

1- Conflict Resolution dialog

In this window the user can't choose the name of the files... Imagine if 2 pictures (or more) have the same name, but are totally different. You would want to keep both...But it would be very interesting to be able to edit the name of each file directly from the dialog by clicking on it's name (for example) so the user doesn't have to go to the folder and edit the name afterwards ...

After copy, the name would be good and no time lost to go and rename ... =)

2 - Pending copy jobs dialog (Multiple jobs)

In this window, your implementation requires that the user modifies himself the priority by a click on pause/resume . In this case you assume the user is here but sometimes he has to leave... the process continues but that doesn't necessary mean the user had no priorities... Problem: he wont be able to manage jobs...

Maybe a solution would be to give each job a priority by beeing able, in this dialog, to drag and drop the jobs on a top position of the list if it needs to be done in a specific order. This feature could be enabled by adding a global pause button that would process each job individually in order after the first in the list is done...

3 - Copy priority

The same proposition of priorities could apply in the normal single copy job window :

In W7 the last file selected, is the active one, so it is the first to apply the action Copy/Move/Delete ... etc...

It would be much more interesting if the files were processed in the order you selected them (the user usually select files in the same order he thinks to it, meaning often by alphabetic or interest/priority order)

If its a random selection that doesn't change anything...

Wishing you all good luck ! =) Thanks !

Benjamin B.

You are fiddling on the margins.

The best way to help users manage their files is to revert to a dual pane file manager, oops, sorry, file explorer, to allow easy manipulation of source and destination directory trees.

It would be nice to have the option to rename old files as well as new files.

Additional ideas, which maybe completely unfeasible and you guys have already brainstormed:

Could you add a priority level (if you have multiple copy operations, some could take place at higher level then others).

Also it would be great if you could start continue copy operation when another task is say 50% complete. This could be achieved if the progress bar could be dragged to the right.

When copying files can there be a transform operation. To copy file from A to B (but on B it is zipped), or jpeg changed to bmp. It should also be possible to copy a zip file and have it uncompress from A to B

These changes seems little but will have a huge impact in user point of view.

Well done Microsoft! keep it up.

bye

argh how ugly centered window titles >_<

Has the 256 character limitation (like in XP) been resolved with regards pathway length being exceeded being  when performing backups?

Additional ideas, which maybe completely unfeasible and you guys have already brainstormed:

When copying a directory should be possible to filter the list of files, based on file name, size or file type.

Could it be possible to hook into this copy operations, so for example have a rule where an email is sent if a file is copied. Or we determine are one naming rules etc

Very positive changes.  I'd like to for the copy job to continue while items that are causing problematic are skipped, i.e. if there is a list of 50 files being copied, and there's a problem with the second file, then the 3rd etc would continue to copy and only those with problems are highlighted and held up.  

I'd proposed that if there was some sort of flag or attribute set on the file to indicate that the file is due to be copied/moved and what the reason for the lack of the activity was, so that when moving large amounts of files the ones without problems can be actioned, and those that had a problem could be dealt with separately, at source.

Very very nice. Finally a complete copy and move management. I like the unified window for all ongoing transfers and the Pause button. :)

I don't really like the elimination of some dialogs. They could be annoying, but they're also useful. If I move to the Recycle Bin a file I didn't want to move there, why should I go to the Recycle Bin to restore it? Yeah, that was my fault, but if there's a confirmation dialog I could avoid the mistake. Same for folder merge. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

PS: other two things. Please, make the Ribbon Explorer an option. And that Start button visible at the beginning of the video is really ugly, better to stick with the current one.

I think that a few users pointed out that there isn't a "Copy, but keep both files" option from Windows 7. Do I assume then that  when clicking the "Choose" option that ticking files from "Files from..." and "Files already in..." will perform the same action?

Other than that, think the new copying interface is great so far.

I really like the direction you are taking this but:

A queuing feature would be very much appreciated! I want to be able to initiate all my copying and have Windows figure out what to queue based on what disks the copying affects, and then don't bother.

If the same could be done for unzipping that would be great as well.

If I get these additions, I wouldn't need a 3:rd party tool. :)

One of the most annoying things in Windows 7 Explorer is trying to delete a file and getting a message saying : "Cannot delete file because some application is still using it" (or something along these lines).

What application? Where? Could you provide in Windows 8 an option to force delete a file?

Thanks and keep the good work!

I agree with some of the comments above, Aero looks dated and bulky. If you want to go for dense and concise and add in amazing cool features like that, better get rid of the ones that still make them look and feel old and bulky. Transparancy, multiple levels of shadings, blurs, etc etc. Metro is the way to go, it makes complex tasks LOOK easy too, and that's the way to go.

I just do not believe this !

Only sixteen years of developing, and now it is ! Advanced copy progress bar for Window$ !

Respect, M$ developers !

Pardon; "developers".

Love the "Choose Files" dialog, but you've only shown it with several screenshots. I can imagine there are users that have a large amount of conflicting names. At such times I really hope there is an op option to filter them by date and maybe have a searchbox.

Also, what's the default behavior when copying folders that have file name collisions (not files as in the screenshots)? Will they silently merge or will we get a "Choose Folders" dialog? Great work so far!

I agree with Hugo Nogueira.

There should be at least the info which process is preventing file from being deleted. Better yet, you can automatically close the process and start it again when deleting is done.

Also I'm wondering what happens when you have many copy/move jobs? The screen height has its limits. Especially when you put in "detailed view" mode. Is there just a vertical scroll bar for this cases?

I would suggest to distribute copy/move jobs vertically AND horizontally (two columns would be great) when reaching 4,5 vertically positioned jobs, so the need for scroll bar would appear a bit later.

..great inbuilt support ..to replace installed teracopy and etc s/w

thanks..

Sadly you still haven't solved the most common problem: If something goes wrong while copying a folder (or a bunch of files), half of the files are in the new location, half are in the old location. Please give us transactioned file copy.

If I want to do copy and replace on a single image then the new choose files dialog now requires two mouse clicks instead of one as I first have to check the box, or can I just click the text / thumbnail?

The choose files dialog makes sense only when you are dealing with more than 1 file.

Looks great, finally I can get rid of TeraCopy and all the bugs in it..

Looking forward to Win8!!

Now this is what I call very intuitive design! I highly applaud this redesigned dialog. The improved dialog clearly gives more control to the user on a per-file basis all from a single dialog. I notice you show infotips in the file conflict dialog. That's another nice improvement. I assume checking the topmost checkboxes in both left and right columns selects all the files in the columns below? That hasn't been confirmed by Microsoft.

Many users are requesting the option to queue file operations. I second this. Can we have a checkbox that says "Queue new file transfers" There should be no default setting for this checkbox. It should remember the LAST USED setting. That is, if it was checked the last time, all new transfers should be queued by default.

I think the colors are good too. They reflect the colors in the Windows flag. Plus green and red are already being used in the Windows Vista/Windows 7 copy UIs and keeping the previously used colors same as what they mean in earlier OSes is important. Also, I personally think Aero with its 3D and glass looks far better than Metro which is flat and less shading/gradients.

Some more optimization requests from me:

1.  Prefer faster connections like Ethernet over Wi-Fi when both are connected. Currently, I have to disconnect my wireless connection to ensure network transfers will be done over ethernet and then reconnect my wi-fi.

2.  No moving of the copy dialog should be required. It should be positioned correctly after its expands or positioned correctly beforehand so there is room at the bottom when it expands instead of it going below the taskbar and out of the screen.

3.  The first file name dialog should include 4 options instead of the current 3: Replace all, Skip all, *Rename all*, or Choose. Rename All as a 1-click option is needed so users don't have to click "Choose", then select both columns, then Continue (4 clicks!)

4.  How are crashes handled? Is the file copying done in a separate process from Explorer.exe? If Explorer.exe crashes, copying should not terminate.

5.  For longer file paths which are truncated, the beginning and end of the path should be shown like the breadcrumbs bar does on shorter sized dialogs.

6.  Have you considered an advanced form of replacing files? Like an option that says: Replace all by ______ (and there is a dropdown with all the metadata properties you get in Explorer (Newer/Older Date modified, date created, smaller/larger size, or larger resolution in case of photos).

7.  There is already an IFileIsInUse interface since Vista isn't it? (msdn.microsoft.com/.../bb775874(v=vs.85).aspx). Surely that can be used to get the app name or window handle of the app that is keeping a lock on the file?)

Let me remind the Windows team again that removing features without giving the user an option is a major turn off so I hope that while by default the confirmations are gone for deleting files to the Recycle Bin and to merge folders, there will be an option to show them. Personally, I don't want files being sent to the Recycle Bin because I accidentally hit Delete on the keyboard or folders being merged without confirmation. The option has always existed in Recycle Bin properties: "Display delete confirmation dialog". So I hope it's just unchecked by default but remains instead of being completely gone. Similarly, I want to be shown a dialog in case of folder conflicts. Please do not remove the folder conflict dialog without giving the user an option.

Lastly, this only improves the experience in the dialog. What is being done to improve the experience in Explorer after copy-paste, delete or rename is done? Currently, all the files are kept continuously sorted and new items appear in their sorted positions. When I rename files one by one in succesion, the files jump all over the place as they get sorted. If I want to monitor a folder for new files getting created or copied, I cannot because the items are continuously kept sorted. This is one of the biggest annoyances of Vista/7. Sorting should behave like a verb, not as a state. If you disagree, give us an option to turn off "Auto refresh/Auto sort" so pasted files or newly created items appear at the end and only get sorted when we click Refresh.

Please clarify three things: 1. does selecting the top most checkboxes select all files in the columns below? 2. Will the option to show/not show delete confirmation dialog for Recycle Bin and for folder conflicts remain? 3. Will there be an option to turn off Auto refresh/Auto sort so any file modification activity such as copy-paste, creation, rename or deletion does not make items move continually to obey the sort order and they appear at the end and get sorted only when the view is refreshed??

I agree with @Jack the Slayer

Sadly you still haven't solved the most common problem: If something goes wrong while copying a folder (or a bunch of files), half of the files are in the new location, half are in the old location. Please give us transactioned file copy.

These are some very welcomed and nice changes, team. Very slick.

Also, I agree with Jack the Slayer. If you could just improve on that or fix it in some way, I'm sure we'd all appreciate it.

Now let me in the beta. I've been using MS products since DOS and not once have you let me into the beta. Time to let us veterans in.

I thinks move files in Windows is slow than copy then delete file. I just feels its but I hope if this's real, its would better in Windows 8

Like other people said, if I ask  for more than one copy to be done, please default to some sort of queue rather than running them at the same time, if they use the some disk head.

If the file in the source and target directory has the same attributes and check sum, don’t ask me if I wish to replace it, just skip it.  (Maybe the file system should store a check sum as an extended attribute to speed this up, just clear the checksum when the file is change and cache it when it is needed)

Please order the files to be copied based on disk location so there is less disk head movement.   Then if the target and the source is on the same head, read as many files as possible into ram as a batch, then write then out as a batch, so reducing head movement.

I see no reasons way Explorer often takes longer than using FTP to copy lots of files from a windows server – this should not be the case.  Maybe some system that lets the windows server send the files in the best order for its disk layout would help.

When the source and target folder is on the same disk, some sort of “virtual” copy could be  used with the blocks getting physically copied if “one end” is changed.   This would be great for when I copy a large folder for safety before changing files, mostly the backup folder is just deleted later and well under 1% of the files in the source folder are changed.

Full built in support for de-dedicating on the client would be great, however most window users don’t need to have lots of source trees from related branches on their local disk! (Put we are now getting many copies of the same DLL on some machines)  Disk space is becoming an issue once again, as SSD drives (unlike magnetic drives) are limited in size.

(I hope we will not all be on 100% flash drive by the time Windows 8 ship, I don’t wish to wait that long for Windows 8, not with the great improvements you have already detailed.)

Great improvements but, why not implement a list of copy/move/delete that you can pause/resume/modify. I am thinking in the functionality of supercopier2 et al which I find indispensable.

Also, FastCopy will automatically evaluate source and destinations and when copy jobs they are to conflict in resources they're automatically queued instead of executed in parallel.

Oh, and copy lists also enable collisions and copy error in an elegant, way (no need to stop the 20k file job mid way because of a collision with a minor file like thumbs.db)

About the copy error logging, I completely agree with the folks who have raised this. Copy/Move/Delete should proceed and should notify the user at the end of the job about the files that misbehaved, and present a clear reason for that. This can be similar to the merge UI / conflict resoultion dialog which pops up at the end of the job, so that user the can review/select the options and retry. May be the user follows the suggestions, closes up an app which has opened up the files, and do a retry. Operation succeeds on some of the files, but still some of the files misbehaves. Again the user will be presented with those files and the reasoning. This way there is a filtering and reduction of the file list in the consolidated dialog at the end of each retry, till the user succeeds in running the job. Imagine the pain of doing this one file at a time as it is now. Addition of this along with the cool stuff already mentioned, will make explorer file management kick ass.

This is excellent stuff, this is exactly the kind of stuff that I needed to improve...I like it a lot!

@Steven Sinofsky

I like the improvements your team is doing on trying to improve the user experience with Windows Explorer but some of the items people have mentioned above are all functional items that i'm sure can easily be implemented by your team.. The bulk renames, conflicts during copying causing a pending status, etc.  I'm more concerned in general on how you blend the user experience.  The metro UI is trendy and will most definitely attract people to Windows 8 due to its simplicity and wow factor.  However, and I know this will most likely be answered at build, I am concerned on consistency across the UI.  I'm not sure how you blend Aero with Metro and expect a consistent experience.  While the explorer UI is definitely an improvement over builds of the past, I think people are looking for a cleaner, flashier experience.  You can see this trend with Apple and how the brand recognition and UI design has drawn them into in some cases less capable products.  Would your team be interested in posting a UI blog item on the challenges of doing what I mentioned above.

This is just lovely and great. I've been following closely and reading a few comments myself i see that this is from one of the comments i read yesterday. This give me great hope that windows 8 will be even more amazing then windows 7 was. Your reading these comments and taking all of the feedback into consideration and it keeps my faith alive and running for Microsoft. Thank you for caring about your customers and listening to them. Keep doing this and windows 8 will be AMAZING. Just don't rush anything. I love the UI and i like this idea but as with others i agree with there is room for improvement. I like the Ribbon being in Internet explorer just make sure like the Ribbon in Office 2010 it's customizable.

It's great to see that this functionality will be included out of the box.

'Yellow for pause' is an established UI convention in Windows (the same green/yellow/red scheme is used for PROGRESS controls and taskbar progress bars), so when @AlexSi writes that the colour scheme is not finalised, I hope that any potential changes are implemented consistently throughout the platform.

I have to agree with @Michael Milem that the focus rectangle dots are looking quite dated on a nice UI. I'm not sure what a good alternative would be, however.

I notice that the minimise/maximise/close buttons have increased in size once again (vertically, at least) - does this mean that they'll be even bigger in Windows 9? :) (Also, what's going on with the reduced-width close button in the final screenshot?) I hope those yellow, shadowless legacy tooltips on those buttons have been fixed in Windows 8...

Finally, I know that high production values aren't the aim in this blog, but can't you invest in a copy of Window Clippings (or something similar) and give us some prettier screenshots?

My bad i meant i like the Ribbon in windows explorer. That's what i meant my mistake. Anyway just make sure the Ribbon in Windows explorer is customizable.

Looks great! Thanks for not overlooking the small bits and pieces.  Windows 8 should obviously have new and shiny functionality, but even if it didn't, at the bare minimum it needs to improve upon existing features in all previous versions of Windows.  This is a great step in that direction!  Thanks for the effort!

Excelente buen camino.... ya tienen un comprador

Please add queuing! Allow to queue operation or even add automatic queue/pause to one operation per device.

Thanks!

Can we get a blog post on what changes you guys have done to the Control Panel? Hopefully it's a lot tidier and cleaner :)

I hope this time you will teach Explorer to remember the state of More/Less Details and "Do this for all conflicts" switches. :)

Other than that, TeraCopy and many other utilities mentioned here contain the directions to improve (quequing when working with the same media is the top one), no need in invent anything radical. Heck, even Norton Commander was able to remember "Do this for all conflicts" setting, and it's still not implemented in Windows..

What I would suggest as a REAL MAJOR improvement is the fully implemented Undo feature, which will undelete files, move everything back and even if you'we overwritten some files - restore those. So if I added 50 files and 3 dirs into a directory that already had another 250 files and 15 dirs and replaced 5 of them, I could go back with just one Ctrl-Z. Your new Job list interface is excellent for that - just keep the log of all actions and display the "Undo" button once the job is completed/paused/interrupted. You already have Shadow Copies and System Restore mechanism - this is just the next level.

Some other feats:

* If I used removable drives as source/destination for my job - the undo feature should lett me "Please insert the removable media labeled <VOLUME LABEL>" and give me the options to Cancel or proceed w/o the removable media (i.e. if I moved files from USB stick to HDD, they will be removed from HDD, but not restored on the stick, because I haven't inserted it). As a totally fantastic (and doubtful) experience - cache those files and offer to restore them once the removable media is back. :)

* Advanced user should have control over this feature on a per-drive basis: enable/disable, max. size of files to be cached/shadowed in case of overwriting (I would not want this for 4.5G ISO images) and the size of Undo file cache in either megabytes or days. Global options should include enabling/disabling support for removable drives as well and disabling this feature altogether.

When I am copying 1GB or more of   p o r n   from 1 folder to another, I want to keep all of the pictures.  Can't it just automatically add a number to them without asking me?

I really wish there was the option to copy the file from the left and rename the file on the right in addition to the copy the file from the left and rename it. I often find that I am copying a "newer" file into a folder and want it to keep the original name but would like to keep the original one in the folder on the right around as a backup.

Essentially backup the file in the folder I am copying into by renaming it and then copy in the file being copied with the original name.

Any word on whether or not reliability when copying to/from a USB device is improved?  Here's an easy experiment anyone can try:  Install the trial version of World of Warcraft to a local drive.  Use explorer to copy it off to a USB hard drive.  Blow away the install on the local drive and then copy it back.  Everything appears copacetic but the game won't launch as there is silent data corruption.  This has happened for years on big files.  =/  I also see this when dragging DVD .iso files over to USB storage using explorer or using Explorer to copy big files to a SMB share.  As long as you use the copy/xcopy or a third-party tool, it's fine.  However, explorer cannot be trusted to deal properly with multiple gigabytes of data.  I'd hoped that Win7 had fixed this behavior (I observed it first in XP) but it hasn't.

Two things that you could make better with this.

1. If you copy for example 5 big folders you would probably like it to copy one after another. Make an option for it. Not only a pause button. Allow it to be more automatic.

2. If you put straight line through a graph it's avarage. You don't have avarage here. It's not natural to put an instantaneous value like this.

On my last ms conference visit i asked the speakers about pause/resume button on copy dialog. They said it was stupid and I have not received the prize for the smart questions. But this MS solution contained copy/resume buttons! I should have patented this approach!!!

This is some good stuff guys, keep up the good work. I noticed that the paused files are still showing a download transfer rate, this shouldn't be the case since there is no transfer going on. I know you have promised a UI change so I won't comment on that. For those that keep complaining about the yellow color being used for pause, it clearly says PAUSE so I don't see a problem here. Also in windows Red is usually reserved for errors.

Unrelated question but what have guys got planned in regards to gestures for touchpads? The new UI you showed worked great on touchscreens but the jury is still out on how it will work for the keyboard and mouse, gestures I feel could help blend the two input methods together really nicely.

I recommend the Windows team take a look at a lesser known copy addon called PerigeeCopy (jstanley.pingerthinger.com/pscopy.html) that also offers a number of interesting ideas. It's main goal is the same: merge copy/delete operations in a single window/action, one at a time and ensure copy and delete operations are done with less/smarter prompts. The Windows team can put file copying related options in "Folder Options".

@AlexSi

********One more thing***********

In the 'Conflict resolution' dialog the files from the Source folder should be auto-checked ; Since this reflects the default behaviour.

Didn't you guys notice that there is some confusion over what happens to 'Kobenhavns......jpg' in the example (since both checkboxes are unchecked)

Thanks

Folks, thanks for starting this blog, I admire the initiative to get feedback from community! Here is some feedback regarding file differences during copy process:

I use Total Commander when I need to copy large amount of files. It has a feature called Synchronize Directories which I think has the best UI for understanding the differences between the files. It also, I think, is the best UI to make a decision on the difference. Please check it out!

thanks for the changes. They look nice, but you should still implement a queue feature.

And please improve the Deleting performance. This is a nightmare in Windows. For example, check out several branches, tags from a version control and try to delete the folders. During times time the PC is nearly unusable.

I would like be able to queue a list of files to copy them to some device. So every fiel will be copied one by one. It will be also intresting to be able to keep adding files while they are being copied

The Microsoft tool called ROBOCOPY.EXE has an /EFSRAW switch that I use all the time to copy/backup EFS-encrypted files to another drive without decrypting the files first.  Will the new Win8 copy feature support this by default?  What about EFS copy improvements in general, such as copying over the network when the destination server does not have access to one's EFS private key?  Thank You!

Choose files dialog box looks irritating and confusing. Please don't make it complex for an end-user. It hurts Windows usability.

Why checkboxes in the resolution?  Make it more touch-friendly, you have these wonderful big simple action buttons on the dialog previous to the resolution, but then teeny checkboxes.  Make the each picture a toggle button on and off, and shade it.  DO IT!  :)

Love this blog.

The conflict resolution dialog should show the resolution of image-files, to make it easier to decide which image I want to keep. For example, the same image as Android wallpaper or desktop wallpaper. Would look the same, when just watching the thumbnails of both files. But with the resolution visible, I could choose that I want to keep the higher resolution.

Looks sensible.  I hope there's a 'touch first' version of all this with an immersive experience.  I wouldn't want to have to plug a mouse in just to move some files around if I was using a tablet.

Would also be interested how the selection dialog handles a tree of directories.  The list of files seems like a flat approach.

Nothing that Tera Copy cant do... BOOOORING...!!! i mean... super windows 8 and the only upgrade is managing files??

I see a new start button in the video...

I see a new start button in the video...

What about interface of Windows Explorer in touch screen devices?

Actually, maybe the orb is blurred enough so I can't see it... unless the computer we don't get a close look at is different than the 1 we do, & they're both running different Win 8 builds...

Nautilus in GNOME on Linux has been doing this for years - yet another thing Microsoft copies.

First i would recommend you to restyle Pause/Close buttons. Make them bigger, or something. And second reduce height of transfer graphs.

Also i'm corius about what we see in background on big screen. Taskbar will look like this? From this point what i see is actualy taskbar i imagined windows 8 should have.  Hope we will see soon more...

This is some what different from the normal copy feature and this is more advanced when compared with Tera Copy and this feature made the following additional features.

1. Copying of dual processes is made easy.

2. Copying the files made faster

3. made a new aspect namely select of files while copying.

This is really a good stuff and made easier way of copying.

Can anyone please say me how to make it enabled in my PC?

Great, great work. The appearance of a 'Pause' button on the copy dialog is cause for celebration alone. The bandwidth measurements and graphs are the icing on the cake.

One additional feature I'd like to see with the copy dialog: the ability to queue and prioritize copy jobs. Being able to pause individual jobs is nice but requires manual oversight throughout the overall process if you wish to avoid performance issues from concurrent copy jobs. Being able to queue jobs would allow maximum throughput on high priority items when you know they share a bottleneck with low priority jobs.

The conflict resolution dialog is also much cleaner and more useful. I particularly like that you say you can open files directly from that dialog.

One other feature I would love to see here: a way to flag or list particular files within the conflict resolution dialog for further review. When you copy a bunch of files from A to B, you frequently want to overwrite only a portion of the conflicting files in destination folder B (per your example). But after the copy job is complete, you very often want to know which of the files within source folder A were NOT copied, in order to further review or edit them (maybe manually updating their filenames first) before reattempting the copy.

I'll be honest: I'm not sure how best to handle that. Perhaps an option for an 'Advanced' conflict resolution dialog which has additional 'Flag for review' checkboxes beside each conflicting file, and a 'Next' button that takes you an additional step of the dialog which then allows you to perform additional functions on those flagged files (for example, copying them to an alternative folder so you have them all in one place for review, without having to manually go back and filter them out of the source folder.) Probably not the cleanest suggestion but, while the new dialog is nice for simplifying resolution of basic filename conflicts, that's usually not the end of the process for anyone engaged in serious, large-scale copy jobs.

Still, I love the progress so far!

@Alex

Why not make a text box where you can fill in a different name as an extra option when a name conflict is found?

Also: when dragging a bunch of files onto a folder, can it be possible to open the folder when you are hovering it for enough time?

Can it be possible to shorten the amount of clicks/actions to rename a file?

You have to change the UI, it doesnt fit with the Metro UI. Its inconssistent

I love what is being worked on - look forward to the changes.

I do agree with comments that the "resolve files" dialog is a UX disaster.  I tend to agree with Phil B who writes that the typical use-case is to keep the files with the action associated, and that this dialog presents both cases with equal weight, and equal awkwardness of selection.  Figure out from your telemetry the 80/20 typical use-cases, and design around it.

Take a look at the typical usage arcs presented in Microsoft's layout guidelines here:  msdn.microsoft.com/.../aa511279.aspx

- smooth curves (1-2-4), avoid zig-zag windows, etc.

I would also suggest that the conflict-resolution not interrupt the overall process, and instead be reserved for the end of the action, in order to facilitate unattended scenarios.

USB 3.0 - it's cool, but what about Thunderbolt in a new OS?

The logic of selecting neither version of a conflicting file seems flawed.  If I don't check either the new or the old one, in answer to the question "Which files do you want to keep?", then that seems to imply that they both will be deleted -- which is obviously not the case.

Very many professional users using all over the world TotalCommander (www.ghisler.com/index.htm) on Windows. But I'm very happy about this improvements within W8! Keep the good work!

UI of that copy progress dialog is lame. Look at KDE 4 copy dialog or graphs in resource monitor...

You need to redone every single part of msstyle to get rid of the old parts of the final theme.

Same applies for imageres.dll

IMO, "Windows 7 Conflict Resolution dialog" looks way better than the proposed solution.

We should be able to click the graph to show a "maximal speed" bar, and move it to the desired speed. This means you can give a certain operation priority without having to be there when it finishes (if you paused other operations, they won't continue...)

(I didn't read all 180 comments, no idea if this was already suggested)

I have two requests:

#1

If I go to delete, rename, copy or move a file or folder, Windows Explorer should immediately cancel all background information-gathering operations that are causing locks on the affected files or folders. It is extremely frustrating the number of times I've tried to delete folders with videos and other media only to tell me that the "file is in use", when in fact it is Windows Explorer holding stuff in memory so it can read file dates and create thumbnail previews.

#2

You need to find a faster way to sort the contents of a large folder. For example, I have an images folder with about a thousand images. I have it defaulted to sort by file date, but every time I open the folder I have to wait upwards of 10-20 seconds while it reads all the file dates so it can sort them correctly. Previous versions of Windows never had to spend lots of time reading file dates every time I entered a folder, so it puzzles me why Windows 7 suddenly needs to do this in a clearly less-efficient manner.

Good to see that basic functions in Windows 8 are getting a revamp. Nice Job!

@AlexSi - You should update the main blog post showing the dialog that occurs before the Conflict Resolution dialog is shown, a lot of people haven't watched the video or found your post in the sea of comments and are assuming that the dialog is what is always shown when a conflict arises.

This is very good, Much better Windows Explorer UI.

Now add this functionality to WP7.

@6205 re imageres.dll It's one of the easiest files to hack. Try www.bome.com/Restorator

I wish there was an ADD also, where only the files that are not on the receiving side are added.

It is nice, I would like to push the point that there should be options for the following

* continue all non conflicting copy operations ( that is except for this particular file/folder all other non conflicting operations should continue.

* the copy dialog boxes should be at the very begining or at the very end. (Look @ windows installation, you gather all info then start)

* it will be great if the recycle bin had an option to go hierarchical rather than showing 100000 items all at same level.. and we need to do sort by folder.

*tera copy nails the copy procedure. But it is annoying when i need to do a move. WIndows explorer is faster than teracopy

* Also make it sit in the system tray.

Looking forward for the Windows explorer bolg listing enhancement.

tabbed browsing/ ribbon / hope of eliminate right click and easy way to compare files

I welcome the improvements outlined in this blog post and demonstrated in the related video. On a related topic, I sincerely hope that Microsoft and the Windows development teams are seriously researching and implementing modern features and functionality in the NTFS file system (or a replacement ‘default’ Windows file system). As a long-time proponent of Windows, I would like to have an answer for the features and functionality of the ZFS file system.

While Windows Vista and Windows 7 have made important incremental improvements to NTFS, I believe the original design decisions and features are showing their age. Given its age, it is a testament to the fundamental design decisions that NTFS has adapted so effectively thus far. However, much research and innovation in the file system space has lead to NTFS falling seriously behind the advanced features offered by more modern file systems.

Please share with us how Microsoft and the Windows teams are addressing this for Windows 8 and future Windows operating systems.

The yellow color for pause screen looks like warning color, like something is not right or copying slow. User understands green is OK, yellow is warning, red is NOT OK. So, I think it's better to use grey color instead for pause. Just my 2c.

Anyway, it's a nice and pleasant improvement. Keep it coming.. :)

I hope the command line commands will still be present !

If you wanted to leave the Yellow color, I'd put a big "Paused" on the yellow graph... not just above it.  Though I'd prefer a Grey graph.

I went ahead and created a mockup of changes I think would make the File Dialog better, color groupings.  As well the name of the file is on both sides, if you click it you can rename it, and some arrows.

i51.tinypic.com/333v1og.jpg

@JL said...

"You know when you start a big copy job and realize that you are doing it over the wireless.  So you grab a  network cable and plug it in.  Does the file copy know to utilize the faster connection now? "

Nope, it doesn't work like that.  If you start a file copy on one connection it will continue on that connection until completed.  If you started a really big file copy operation on wireless and want to switch to wired you should cancel it, connect the net cable and then restart the file copy job.

I can see IT Pros loving features such as throughput graph. But what about average computer users? Does this feature help Windows compete against iOS? I don't think so.

I do agree with (and I vote for):

1. Queue whenever needed to optimize performances

2. Auto-magically switch to faster channels (i.e. when a copy started on WiFi and then ethernet cable is available during copy)

3. Color on paused copy should be gray (on the copy info details dialog)

4. Be smart and filter out the "fake conflicts", i.e. identical (CRC or byte per byte) file on source and destination

4. If you really want to improve the whole "file copy experience" you'd need to implement file versioning (as easy to use and understand as "previous versions of this file" method attached to file istances (for the UX, see my note on UI at the end of the comment). That way, many things can be easer:

4.1 As I can always go back to previous versions on a file by file basis, most of the time I'll never need to opt for the detailed conflict resolution dialog and I'll choose the replace option in the first simpler dialog, because in fact I'm also choosing to take both of them without "old fashioned" filenames with trailing numeration like "myfile (1)".

5. While I do agree with Chen, upon wich I've based my consideration #4 about file versioning, I still think the detailed conflict resolution dialog is a great idea, with the improvements suggested by many others:

5.1 Use some sort of highlight on file icons instead of check boxes

5.2 On top you can use icons of "pile of file" to substitute checkbox and represent two quick selection action: "replace all" and "maintain all originals" (no need for the third option "take both of them", as explained on #4.1)

6. In the "consolidated copy" dialog I suggest to inherit the UX of DAW programs, where many audio tracks can be played altogether: each track can be muted but also can be set as "solo". In the same way, if you add the ability to set a "copy me first" status to a single file transfer (that save the status of the others file transfer, then pauses all other transfers until the single file transfer has ended or aborted, then restore the status of the others file transfer), on my opinion you could cover most of the users needs.

7. if you eventually add the queue functionality to the "consolidated copy" dialog, add the "power user" ability to move items inside the queue.

Finally, a general consideration, not only related to this post :

When you first developed a O.S. for mobiles, you ported the UX and UI of windows PC to Windows Mobile, and we all know the story.

When you developed the Windows Phone 7 (and I'm an happy user and app developer of it) you taked a very important decision: different devices (PC and phone, in that case) need different UX and UI, so you moved away from Windows Mobile and invented Metro.

Now that you're building Windows 8, please don't do the same (reversed) error of Windows Mobile: DO NOT METROize the Windows 8 ! Although I do Metro un Win Phone 7 (and Mango is really great, by the way) I think the most challenging task un building Win 8 is to be wise and accept that there must be different flavors of Win 8, depending on the device. Same UX, different UI this is my bet.

Being the ones that develop the next Windows, knowing how much this will impact on the lives of more than a billion people, this must a very exciting experience, and I must admit that I really like to be part of it even in a very microscopic way, like posting my comments on it.

Really thanks to enable us to cooperate with you.

> "Any Windows user knows that it's the small changes that make a big difference! THANK YOU!"

Indeed, just the inclusion of "New Folder" in the explorer chrome in 7 made me incredibly happy.  I am a huge organization nerd when it comes to my folder structure, so it is actually a fairly used feature for me.

In terms of file management, what would be super awesome is transparent version management, so that I can copy over files but still check previous versions should I have messed something up.  That would be beautiful (and HDD manufacturers would love you for consuming more space, even if some of the consumers might complain)

kudos on the continued push for simplicity. I know that much of the new interface has yet to be discussed. I just hope that file management and other basic tasks won't require a constant 'jarring' switch between the new Metro interface, and the old Windows style desktop view. I understand this change will have to happen for many backwards compatibility reasons, but file management shouldn't be one of them.Looking forward to seeing how everything meshes together come September!

@Dennis MSFT Surely it would be expected that if connection is lost/interrupted the file copy operation would pause and then resume on the replacement connection?  Certainly this is the behaviour I would expect, especially in scenarios where I may be connected via Wifi in patchy areas, 3g, etc.  Its not uncommon for notebooks to disable the WIFI interface when an Ethernet cable is plugged in, creating a similar scenario.

Any improvements to the file system and NTFS? This is really needed.

@Jeff: You can disable the delete confirmation dialog right now by opening properties on the recycle bin.

@Etrigan: If you don't have a confirmation dialog, you can always undo it. That works for move and delete already.

On a side note, if you hold shift while deleting a file, it removes it permanently rather than moving it to the recycle bin.

As for color for a paused action, I vote for either a gray as people have suggested, a subdued version of the active action color, or a light blue color that looks like ice.

I am excited to see some tidbits of what you guys have been working on and am impressed so far. I can't wait until Build to see a full unveil. W8 FTW!!

In the "Choose Files" dialog, checkboxes are too hard to target with a mouse or a finger. Make each file selectable by clicking on its thumbnail, and highlight it to show it's selected. Much quicker and more intuitive.

Guys I love this! Especially the pause button

Wow, nice!! Pretty impressive and yes, often it's the small things that make a difference.

"Could you add an option somewhere to always show "more details" by default?  Or make it an registry entry or something, please?

I know this will make things a little on the "too complicated" side, but would you consider an option to make it a queue system, i.e. a check box to "Do the action one at a time."  So the user does not have to pause and unpause manually?"  

I agree with this request 100%  So do my fellow I.T. professionals.  So we have 400% agreement.  Pretty Please.

Side by side comparisons for filename conflicts are great but resolving it is almost always based only on which is BIGGER or NEWER.  The proposed UI presents this but I have to parse the information, line by line.  I would love to see icons or words beside the thumbnails to show which is larger, which is newer.

Really good work! What about:

A message warning the user about locked files prior it starts copying/moving rather than during the copy and whenever possible, show the process responsible for the lock

An IT Pro advanced option allowing to chose to copy DACL/SACL/Advanced Attributes/etc… Sometimes you feel like you do not want to use Robocopy/play with registry.

An indication (icon?)  about the nature of the source/destination media: local volumes, internal/external device, CD, network place…

I can live with the current progress color scheme but I would prefer: Green = OK, Yellow = Slow, red = slow/hung, grey = paused

Small question: Taking into account protocols’ constraints, will all of this be available for RDP file operation or WebDAV redirector/WebClient?

Todd makes a very important point. See the XP (classicshell.sourceforge.net/.../after.png) or Vista (classicshell.sourceforge.net/.../before.png) dialogs: It shows (Newer) or (Larger) so the user does not have to figure that out himself. Please take care to not drop that useful information the new file conflict dialog!!

USELESS 0.0

Make Windows run properly.

I haven't read all the comments yet so don't if someone already said it, please forgive otherwise...

While I don't really see much of a problem with the transfer colors (green ongoing, yellow paused) I do see a problem having the same button for both operations, the ongoing/active copy job should display a pause button ( [II] ) as it does now but the paused one should display a start button ( [>] ) otherwise the meaning of the displayed button is misleading. Everyone use different means to understand what he/she sees (for many is whatever the text says, for others is visual clues, like a button)

Other thing (and I know this have been mentioned but let me second it): the text explaining what's gonna be done if conflictive files are keeped. While I do like the copy resolution dialog I think there should a clearer message like the previous dialog: "Copy, but keep both files - The file you're copying will be renamed File_Name (2).ext". That's much much clear that saying "a number is going to be added to its name" . I know I know, "I" understand (being tech-savvy-like person) what it means a number added to its name, you could even not write that and I would presume that would be the action to be taken, and yes, today many understand more OS concepts without being savvy but there will be the ones (like some comment I read here) that won't understand what a "number added to its name" is gonna mean.

Finally, the thumbnails for the conflict dialog, while not all that bad, I think that's going to create the opposite effect of helping users to do the copy jobs faster/efficiently, it has the potential to be distracting (Imaging the user pausing just to see the image "hmmm are really the same? hmmm it looks like it, oh no, wait, it seems that the one on the right has a little white point the other doesn't, hmmm what should I do, hmm....")

Love every bit of new file management implementations. Keep up the good work. Go Windows, Go Microsoft!

Will the prompts which we get currently for system files or read-only files remain? Again, there can be an option about it in Folder Options.

I really like this idea (I quite often have these problems). But just one tiny thing- could you change the conflict dialog to not use checkboxes? I find them annoying, small and fiddly to click; and this will make resolution longer. The big buttons in the Windows 7 dialog are really good for this.

Why are we allowed to keep both files changing the filename of the file being copied and not changing the file name of the file that's already there? In 90% of my experience I'm copying a new file in a folder that already has an old version, so it would be much better to alter the name of the existent file, IMO.

I think the color scheme should be simplified:

1) Green - normal transfer speed

2) Yellow - <30% average transfer speed

3) Red - <10% average transfer speed

4) Grey - Paused

Hiding the 'Maximise' button (rather then greying it out) when it's not usable would be a nice touch on all dialogue boxes. Thanks for all the great work on Windows in general too! :)

LOL, I guess I should have waited to ask the question I did on the last blog post, because this answered a lot!

As far as pausing transfers, is there a way to make them automatically resume when the previous one is done?  Like, queuing file transfers, so they all move at a fast speed and you don't have to manually unpause each?

Great job on File Copy! and Awesome comments from Todd, Marc, Will, Vladimir, x9.

There are a few things that I believe should be incorporated in the Windows UI, borrowing from web:

1. Windows should be able to show no dialogue for copying/moving file. It should work seamless. the color progress bar on explorer icon in the Task bar that shows copying is in progress. Especially if you're moving to tile based interface for the tablets. Dialog Boxes in general belong to the past: the area of windowed Windows!

2. Dring a file copy Windows might encounters a few file conflicts. It stops file copy and waits for user input for 3 files out of thousands. Windows could use the time while user decides to copy the rest of files that have no conflict. This is very irritating when you start copying and leave the PC hoping for the copy to be finished when you're back and you find it stuck on the 5th file out of 2000 files waiting for your input.

The problem with transactioned copy is: what if you are recovering files from media which can be read with great difficulty or which will be unavailable later (like a network location or domain)? In that case, I would want what was already copied to remain instead of starting all over again.

The new features look great.  But, please fix tihs issue first before any new features are worked on.

connect.microsoft.com/.../bug-when-expanding-folders-in-explorer-server-2008-r2-and-windows-7

Love these videos! Hope there is a new one everyday!

I hope you've also sped up the process of copying from a CD/DVD. That has always been a horribly slow process - much slower than it should be even considering that the drives are slower than hard drives.

Also, I agree with Robbo 23 Aug 2011 8:57 PM - "What about that problem where you're copying hundreds of files and there's a problem somewhere and instead of telling you the problem and what you can do to fix it, the whole thing just stops, and you have to manually find the problem, sort it out, and then start the whole copy procedure again. That would be good to be fixed also."

    Trying to avoid that problem is why I installed Teracopy. It helps but even it can run into issues. It woiuld be nice to have them fixed. I seem to have a particularly bad time copying fonts.

Please add the number to each comment for easy searching!

It's a start, but it still needs work. It's not at all clear, for example, what happens if I don't check either version of a file. The wording of "Which file do you want to keep?" seems awkward too, I'm making a copy so I obviously want the originals left intact. I know that's not really what the dialog is asking me, because it's really only talking about the destination, but that's a lot less clear than it was in the Windows 7 version.

And I'd definitely add a "me too" to all the comments pointing out that little checkboxes seem awkward and rather dated. Let me just click on the ones I want to keep and then highlight them, it's more in keeping with the metro effect and should be a bit more 'touch friendly' as well.

It's a start, but it still needs work. It's not at all clear, for example, what happens if I don't check either version of a file. The wording of "Which file do you want to keep?" seems awkward too, I'm making a copy so I obviously want the originals left intact. I know that's not really what the dialog is asking me, because it's really only talking about the destination, but that's a lot less clear than it was in the Windows 7 version.

And I'd definitely add a "me too" to all the comments pointing out that little checkboxes seem awkward and rather dated. Let me just click on the ones I want to keep and then highlight them, it's more in keeping with the metro effect and should be a bit more 'touch friendly' as well.

It's a start, but it still needs work. It's not at all clear, for example, what happens if I don't check either version of a file. The wording of "Which file do you want to keep?" seems awkward too, I'm making a copy so I obviously want the originals left intact. I know that's not really what the dialog is asking me, because it's really only talking about the destination, but that's a lot less clear than it was in the Windows 7 version.

And I'd definitely add a "me too" to all the comments pointing out that little checkboxes seem awkward and rather dated. Let me just click on the ones I want to keep and then highlight them, it's more in keeping with the metro effect and should be a bit more 'touch friendly' as well.

These improvements, while slightly are overdue.. ;), are just great. As have been mentioned throughout these comments, I would feel even more excited if there was, for example an option to choose all most recent files (and other similar options). I actually expect Windows 8 to be and to look just great in every single aspect, and I hope Microsoft does just that.

Great idea and well implemented!  I do hope the graph of the transfer speed get's a UI overhaul - bring those smug mac user's down a notch.

Also don't forget keyboard usability of the "Choose Files" dialog. Considering tab key or arrow keys based navigation, the bottom buttons and top most checkboxes which are for the entire column should be together instead of separating them by the filename conflict list.

The conflict resolution dialog needs a bit of work. The horizontal lines separating the files make it difficult to see that the labels at the top are column labels and not simply another row. In other words, it's not clear that the data are separated into columns -- the horizontal lines are counter to the way you're trying to organize and display the data as columns.

Looks great!

Another agree on:

Robbo 23 Aug 2011 8:57 PM - "What about that problem where you're copying hundreds of files and there's a problem somewhere and instead of telling you the problem and what you can do to fix it, the whole thing just stops, and you have to manually find the problem, sort it out, and then start the whole copy procedure again. That would be good to be fixed also."

I've always been amazed this hasn't been fixed yet. Even just the option to ignore the problem file(s) and keep going would have saved me a lot of time over the years. It just dies with everything half copied.

It would be GREAT if we could upvote and downvote comments! It would reduce double comments and would set priorities.

Wow, 20 years later, it could not have been a moment too late :-)

Wow, 20 years later, it could not have been a moment too late :-)

Some controls like pause, cancel button.. etc should be made a bit larger for touch or tablet devices..

I think the "choose file" part should have a scroll bar at the bottom-left corner to enlarge thumbnail just in case... The check box is great for non-touch PC... however if it's a tablet... it's pretty small and annoying to tap on--->the team can give user ability to tap the rectangular zone around the thumbnail (just like selecting files in Windows Explorer)  to select the particular file... re tap them to unselect...  By the way, the team also need to consider "drag select" to select multiple files instead clicking each check box in case there are too many files you want to choose....

Is the number preceding the "MB/s" units in those graphs really a power-of-ten based MB/s number, or is it a power-of-two based number that should be accompanied by "MiB/s" units?

Apple OS X switched to real decimal numbers a while ago, so their "MB" numbers are correct.  Microsoft should do the same.

Would be nice if the file system copy process is faster. On a Mac, I can copy and move files much much faster than on windows.

Nice stuff ms could  u add option to run the ction whjle idle :-)

Another request for a queue system if either the source or destination file shares a physical drive. Nothing more annoying than needing to copy multiple files in different location on one drive,, and watching the entire process take 5 times as long just because its trying to do them all at the same time. Thanks!

Another request for a queue system if either the source or destination file shares a physical drive. Nothing more annoying than needing to copy multiple files in different location on one drive,, and watching the entire process take 5 times as long just because its trying to do them all at the same time. Thanks!

Does anyone know a little more about the UI with a mouse? I was watching the first video (linked earlier in the article) which I had never seen and as much as it looks beautiful and amazing I have to wonder how 'fluid' and 'simple' these things will be without a touch screen. Unless this is only meant for tablets and not regular desktop pcs because who really has touch capability on their primary pcs?

What would the chances of a multi-pane windows explorer feature so a person can look at the contents of two or more folder simultaneously in one windows explorer instance? Or, add tabs to windows explorer for multiple folder viewing. That would be helpful and useful! Either would be very useful, but the first one would be most helpful!

My compliments on this blog, it's great to see Windows 8 take shape and also great to know the team(s) are taking input from users seriously. Don't let the Linux/Mac trolls get you down, this is great stuff.

Glad to see this improvement in the UI - having a single dialog box containing the progress of all filesystem operations is logical and elegant. Question: The included video shows the classic desktop. Two questions:

1) In what context will the classic desktop be visible in Windows 8? Can I make it my default appearance if I'm using a desktop computer (or even a tablet if I choose to)?

2) Do you have a UI for filesystem operations on the tablet oriented view of things?

Keep up the good work!

Dear microsoft

We need a new filesystem in Windows 8, improving a new and mor emodern filesystem can stop the OS file fragmeentation or at least reduce it to very low levels.

This is great news BTW ,and i am waiting news regarding the optimization of a new filesystem

These are indeed some nice improvements - I especially like the consolidated copy window.

You have so many great comments already, so I'll keep mine short. It basically comes down to "Keep It Simple Silly". For instance, the Choose Files window could be made much easier. The "If you select both versions, the copied file will have a number added to its name" is more complicated than it needs to be. Please see this mock up: http://t.co/HAVj6bW . Notice that the user doens't have to think (for example, to "keep both" is just a check box and Windows automatically renames it).

Even better would be automated versioning - if the file is duplicate, just version it; don't even ask.

Overall, great stuff. Thanks for sharing this with us and taking input. I'm super excited about Windows 8!!

Awesome Really i liked it!!!

Wouldnt Leaving both checkboxes unchecked (as in the video) lead to some confusion ?

I know that when you are working and putting a lot of thought into your movements with mouse it is hard to hit small checkboxes. So I would suggest making it possible for the user to click on the image/text to select the needed copy, and don't forget about shift in case I have a dozen files and need lets say preserve the first 7 and replace the next 5 so I would prefer to click on the first then shift click on the last bunch of 7, then do the same with the other 5 or something like that. At least it will speed up the process of selecting between required files.

Just thought of an another thing that would make my life a bit easier: make a light highlight for newer files. Seeing dates as strings is nice, yet you have to think and translate those dates yet if there is even a light hint for the newer file then it will make decisions faster as you will not have to interpret dates, just use visual ques that are easier to process.

And not to forget that files that are the same (ie dates and sizes are equal) then probably put them at the end of the list and gray them out probably to just show that it doesn't really matter which one.

In short: add visual ques so that you need less brainpower to process a long list of files.

the problem with the conflict resolution dialog for me is that it doesn't have clear outcomes the way the current single stage dialog does - I have to internalise that the left and right columns are source and target and then it makes sense to pick one file or the other, bolding shows me that a date is important and I can read them to say 'that's newer' but it's just not that clear. I'd like to see clearer, more actionable labels like LARGER, NEWER on the different files. You can't have single, large action buttons for multiple choice, but I think there could be a way to make the outcomes more obvious without me peering and counting on my fingers. And suppose there are 50 conflict files where only 2 have any difference in file size or modification date - is there an option to just see the files that don't detect as being the same?

very cool! this looks like a great improvement that many people will appreciate.

Please fix the bug in Windows Explorer in Windows 7 which forces you to click on the files on the right pane before you can scroll down. Intuitively, one should only need to hover the mouse over the right pane to scroll up/down. But somehow it was implemented in such a way that if the left pane is active, when scrolling using a mouse wheel, regardless of the location of the mouse cursor, the left pane will be scrolled up/down.

RE UX disaster:

OK the files display is ok. left and right hand side, great. But it means I will be forced to use the damn mouse to confirm a file copy, just like Win 7.

Why oh why cant you give us a keyboard shortcut to confirm file copies - I'm a developer so constantly copying new versions of code into directories. having to use the mouse or multiple keystrokes is a PITA.

I've waited long enough I think my post actually didn't go through, so I'll try again:

Please consider using a checksum/file size/date algorithm to determine if the files are actually identical. If they are, I can't think of any situation where the source file can't simply be deleted (in the case of a move operation) or the file skipped (in the case of a copy operation), without any prompt whatsoever- the whole point of the command was to get "this" file into "that" directory, and since it already is, problem solved!

Even if this has to be turned on as an option or registry key, it would save a lot of time and grief.

Thanks so much for this blog- it's amazing to feel like you're listening, and that your users can help Windows 8 be even better!

What I forgot to underscore in my previous comment was that skipping a prompt for identical files means that the only things in the conflict dialog box are actual conflicts...a much shorter list, and one people will get used to the idea that they actually need to pay attention to.

This is very impressive indeed.

Two quick thoughts:

- ability to click on the file thumbnail as well as just the checkbox in the conflict resolution screen - esp for touch users

- if the target drive has an issue (eg full of accidentally unplugged), perhaps this could be treated like an interrupted IE download - ie resumable (eg space freed up or device reconnected).  Perhaps it could turn its progress bar red when poorly to complete a traffic light theme!

Looks great!

How does this interact with the 'Launch folder windows in a separate process' setting?

I'm glad you've redesigned the UI for resolving conflicts during file copying. I always found the Windows 7 Conflict Resolution dialog more confusing than the Windows XP Confirm File Replace dialog.

Please don't neglect the keyboard interface for this UI. In Windows XP you could simply use Alt+A to choose "Yes to All" in the Confirm File Replace dialog. In Windows 7 this became Alt+D to select "Do this for all conflicts", followed by tabbing to the "Copy and Replace" button and pressing space to select. In Windows 8 the Replace or Skip Files dialog should support Alt+mnemonic for each of the 3 main options. Unfortunately the Choose Files dialog is probably too complicated to have a decent keyboard interface.

Great read. Copy dialog seems much better, file conflict dialog - not sure... Can selected items be more noticeable than just tiny check boxes?

Also, window frames and ribbon tabs seem ugly so far. I hope ribbon ui will be enhanced with new ideas for Explorer.

The conflict resolution box is even more confusing now.

Lets see if this goes through if I post it from Internet Explorer :)

It would be very useful if when you cancelled a file copy or move, it prompts you if you want to undo what was already done.  For example, "Move cancelled.  Would you like to put the files that were already moved back in their original location?" or "Copy cancelled.  Would you like to remove the files that were already copied?"

I work in IT and periodically someone will tell me they're missing the contents of a folder starting with S-Z.  What happened is someone accidentally moved the parent folder on the shared drive, it pops up the progress dialog, they see their mistake and press Cancel.  However, they don't realize they have to move everything that was already copied back.  This happens more than you would think.

The only tricky part is what to do with overwritten files.  If you have a shadow copy then you can just restore them silently.  If you don't, well you already generated a list of conflicts beforehand in order to pop up the new dialog.  If there's anything in that list that was overwritten you can add a note saying those particular files can't be restored and exclude them from the cleanup.  By excluding them it means the worst case scenario of a copy+undo is a file overwritten with a different version and not that file being deleted completely.

I say try to make it such that the operations can be reversed and whenever there is a conflict, assume the most common response (probably overwrite) and save the questions (overwrite or not) for the end, then if the user decides not to overwrite, just undo that operation.  Also, if the file you would overwrite is identical, you don't need to ask me, just overwrite (or just delete the original) because there is no data loss at all here.  In fact, I would like to see a file system where duplicated files are actually just pointers to files and a diff file is generated when one file is modified.  That way, I can have copies of files where-ever I want and it won't use an more space.  Then, files become more of an organization technique...

EXCELLENT, now add in an option to have copy/move options proceed either concurrently or sequentially and it will be near damn PERFECT!

First of all, thanks for the improvements, they look great. However, am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with the current conflict resolution dialog? It makes perfect sense to me. Also, what happens in the Windows 8 dialog when there is a large number of conflicts?

A really nice native feature to have is the ability to scan a folder for files containing the same content (i.e. find duplicates) *AND* also integrate this into the conflict resolution dialog. Since duplicate checking requires hashing that may be time consuming, this would be best implemented as an option.

Good work guys :)

We want new interface, you people promise this windows is gonna be a "REVOLUTION" i see just see a few changes. I hope that you people kept your word.

Really interesting follow your work here with Windows 8 guys!

Thanks for having the opportunity sir in send a comment on your post in the subject 'Copy' 'Paste' etc.

In make it simple there are one close related feature for the discussed task in this thread that need more space for improvements and further developing in specifically remember more former copied items.

I have been going through earlier comments until wrote mine and couldn't find more than 3 touching the CLIPBOARD MANAGER which followed us quite some time though the versions of Windows operating systems.

Would be by heaven sent see this manager become a bit more improved than it is for the moment as we have to trust third-party applications taking care of the task in cache and keep a database of saved transfers of files and content of text while working with for instance stuff we do everyday writing or together with the Explorer file-manager. It would make things much easier if Windows had this ability already there built inside.

Finally, congratulations for the well done job here on your blog and good luck all teams !

Several of you have made some great comments about potential usability issues in the new copy experience, and in some cases you’ve suggested changes that we actually tried and tested with users in our usability labs.

Here’s a bit of background on what we saw in our studies (I’m one of the User Experience Researchers on the Windows 8 team).

@Sandeep Polisetty was concerned about the complexity of the detailed “choose files” dialog for less experienced users. As others have commented already we have a much improved initial dialog (only shown in the video) that provides three simple options that will apply to all files that have a conflict – “Replace”, “Skip”, and “Choose”. In usability studies we’ve found that less experienced users do really well with this. We’ve also found a lot of enthusiast users really like the efficiency of replacing or skipping all files with a single click, but also having the control of the “choose files” option when they really need it.

@Oleg and others suggested removing the checkboxes and letting users just click directly on the files they want to keep. This is actually very close to one of our initial designs but we found this performed very poorly when we tested it in the lab with users. The checkboxes immediately cleared up the confusion users felt. Checkboxes were much more effective in conveying what the user needs to do, and the current state of the selection they’ve chosen. @Mike R also points out the checkboxes are small targets. We’ve done some work to let you click anywhere on a file’s icon in this dialog to select the corresponding checkbox.

@Todd suggested we explicitly show which files are bigger and newer in the Choose Files dialog with icons or words. We tested versions of this interface where we explicitly showed what was “newer” and “larger”, but in our usability studies we found users had a strong tendency to ignore the label and look for the comfort of concrete dates and sizes. We were a little disappointed that users weren’t happy with the design that emphasized “newer” and “larger” since like you we knew that this was the one piece of information that you really need. Manually comparing dates and sizes can be time consuming and error prone. However, if you look closely you’ll notice we now use bold text to draw attention to the newer time and larger file size, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many users quickly notice and appreciate the bold identification.

@Gawicks suggested we select all ot the items in one of the columns by default to reduce potential confusion – “Didn't you guys notice that there is some confusion over what happens to 'Kobenhavns......jpg' in the example (since both checkboxes are unchecked)”. Yes, we thought a lot about this potential confusion, but in usability studies we found:

- Most users assumed selecting no checkbox will just leave the files as they are on the disk and they felt most comfortable only selecting the few files they actually wanted to overwrite and leaving the rest blank.

- Users who were unsure would select the relevant checkbox anyway and naturally remove the potential ambiguity (Note: you can select an entire column with one click from the checkbox at the top).

- Selecting one of the checkboxes by default added a step to the common case where you want to select the other version instead.

There were a lot of comments about the color choice for the paused state. As @Quppa pointed out, we chose yellow to be consistent with the established convention in Windows of using yellow for a temporary halted state. Red can look too cautionary and grey looked close to the empty bar or a disabled state.

Thanks everyone and keep the great feedback coming.

Matt

99.9% of the time, the user wants to overwrite files when there's a conflict.

When you don't want that, it's probably because you want to cancel the copy altogether.

And nearly all the conflicts users get are between identical files.

So does Explorer really need to ask me what to do on *every* conflict, *as soon* as it occurs?

If the file is small and can be reasonably checke for equality, or there has been time to perform the check (say, because you're waiting for the user to answer another dialog), *just scan the file and skip it if the source and destination are identical*.

And if the files are genuinely different, or if it's impractical to check that they're identical (perhaps because of file size), *don't block the entire copying operation*. Ask me, and keep copying in the background. And if more conflicts are found before I've answered the first one, coalesce them into one. Merge the newly found conflict information into the dialog that's already being shown.

I don't want to have to hand-hold Explorer. I don't want to be "put in control". I want Explorer to be smart enough that I can just set it on autopilot. Tell it to copy those 17,000 files, get a cup of tea, and come back 5 minutes later and perhaps tell it what to do with all the conflicts it has found. (Even that could be avoided if the "copy" dialog had a simple checkbox for "overwrite conflicting files", which I could select *before* a conflict is found.

Oh, and please tell me what the heck is going on with the statusbar at the bottom of the Explorer Window.

It used to be single-row height, and contain all sorts of useful information, like "combined size of the selected files", and "free disk space in this location". Now, it's grown to double height, *and contains virtually no information*. "20 items", or "6 items selected", or a filename and last-modified time.

What the heck? You needed twice the screen space just in order to remove all the useful information, replacing it with duplicate information that is listed clearly in the main part of the window?

Oh, and how about teaching Explorer that we're no longer living in DOS. Files can have names starting with a dot.

Rob, I think where you say "Apple OS X switched to real decimal numbers a while ago, so their "MB" numbers are correct.  Microsoft should do the same."

Isn't that what "copy jobs" means?

Mr.Steven , so in WIndows 8 we cant use the old Staratmenu style like in WIndows 7 ? , and also is it true if the Windows 8 System Requirements will have the same as Windows 7 does ?

Pls reply Mr.Steven pls

Overlooked in all the musings about the file system improvements is the fact that we will still have access to the file system....HOORAY.  One of the things I absolutely hate about my iPad is the sandboxing of applications and files.  Moving files between applications is an atrocity on the iPad/iPhone, Android and even to a certain extent, WinPhone 7 products.  I miss having access to my file system.  If I want to copy a video to my phone or tablet, I don't want iTunes or Zune to tell me I can't, or that I need to convert it....stop with all that.  I hope Windows 8 will solve these headaches for smaller form factor devices.

That's cool!

Great Work B8 Team! Keep up the good work. This was actually one of the things I wished would change about Windows and now... U guys too much jare! ;-)

Mr.Steven , so in WIndows 8 we cant use the old Staratmenu style like in WIndows 7 ? , and also is it true if the Windows 8 System Requirements will have the same as Windows 7 does ?

Pls reply Mr.Steven pls

@Matt

You've made some great points and I'm glad to see that you guys are already taking on board the feedback. I think peoples main gripes with the checkbox was that that was all they could click to select a file, this is what was done in the video but hearing that we instead select the thumbnail is nice, good for both touch and those that hate having to put their mouse pointer into a tiny box.

I do however disagree with the color choice, yellow maybe the default in Windows but not only is it jarringly bright and out of place with its surrounding controls but to me it doesn't say "halt", it's admittedly a small thing but we're crazy like that. Btw I notice that the graph yellow is a lot darker than the progress bar yellow, how about making that slightly darker system wide to appease everyone?

-

Btw I love how much discussion is generated over a simple file copy dialog, something we won't even see much of if your estimates about USB3 adoption hold true.

I can't begin to imagine what kind of reaction will take place when you show off the bigger changes you've made to Windows 8 (if .NET really is killed then I hope Microsoft have safety bunker on standby for you guys). :p

@Dennis Flanagan - MSFT

> >"You know when you start a big copy job and realize that you are doing it over the wireless.  

> > So you grab a  network cable and plug it in.  Does the file copy know to utilize the faster connection now? "

> Nope, it doesn't work like that.  

> If you start a file copy on one connection it will continue on that connection until completed.

> If you started a really big file copy operation on wireless and want to switch to wired

> you should cancel it, connect the net cable and then restart the file copy job.

BEEP! Wrong answer. You don't tell your users what they shall do, you listen, take note of their problems and try to find a solution.

Most serious file transfering programs can manage this (µTorrent and filezilla to name two), why can't explorer?!

With µTorrent i can even reboot my computer, unplug my battery, move the disk to another computer, reinstall windows and then just open up the transfer again and it will continue where i left it. THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX PEOPLE, explorer doesn't have to work exactly the same way it has done since window 95 with new bling bling on top.

I don't understand what one is supposed to DO with the information presented in the graph. It really just seems like a pretty picture to look at while the real work of copying continues at whatever pace it wants to. Or do you imagine that the user is going to try to understand the peaks and valleys? Perhaps launch PerfMon retrospectively to determine what processes were executing at the time?

Agree with @Robert W. about keyboard support. I'm trying to imagine what a screen reader is going to do with these dialogs. The use of columns (like in the new Choose Files) is often a nightmare to navigate via speech. [My blind wife is paying me to make accessibility comments on these blog posts.]

Please please please for the file compare. Can you do hash comparison (like MD5 or SHA1) to find out if the file is an exact duplicate or not. Currently I have to use a separate program to find out if they are exact copies or not.

Like in the video when you were copying the 4 images. The 3rd one you didn't copy because they "looked" the same. But are they? You are not sure. A hash comparison would really help to be totally sure. You can at least make it an option/button like "verify if same" or something  (because hashing could be intensive for large GB sized files)

Following from Grumpy Wednesday's post, are you going to fix the 256 character limitation in paths for xcopy? With long file names having been in use since Windows 95, it is incredible that xcopy still has this limitation.

just one word for ya "CUSTOMIZATION" and lots of it really we need more options to customize our desktop and windows.

Wow. Good I see this is cool. Not a big change but it is important for me. And the theme good too. Like Metro-clear but it is so much better. It is now better than windows 7. I'm happy for this. But if this is the idea could you make that we can "combine" the copy files like in internet explorer 9 the webpages? That could be better. But it is good too just it was a tip.

In my opinion, the orb removal on taskbar is really nice. I will expect some nicer, more creative animation when hovering, clicking instead of just fade in and fade out in windows 7. However be sure to design the new flag as significant and unique as the team can... not to make user confused the flag icon is just another pinned application on the taskbar!!!!

Overall, great progress keep it up Microsoft!!!!!!

And indeed. That could be good if we can select an option that allows that the dialog always show the "more details". Please take in it more new features like this and new task manager/PDF reader these are super. Just I said: do not make Metro UI just a theme that like for it, but this theme good up to now.

@Chen, @Janson1 and others:  

There were a couple of questions about interrupted file copies when a network connection is lost.  In Windows 8 Explorer will in fact pick up and continue a copy job when the network connection changes.  The copy job will pause and wait for some time before delivering an error that the copy was interrupted.  If it finds a new connection, such as when moving from a Wired to Wireless connection it will seamlessly resume.  This works when your Windows 8 computer goes into standby mode as well, such as when you close your notebook lid and are on the move.  Open the lid again, and your copy resumes (on wireless or wired) where it left off.

Nice evolution of the file-copy UI/UX.

I do think that it would be very interesting to put the color choices -- particularly the yellow-for-paused -- in front of a bunch of real users of various sorts, vs. other possible color choices -- such as grey-for-disabled -- and see what sort of responses and behaviors you get.

If yellow is Windows' standard color for paused, then it makes sense from that perspective.  But having used Windows myself for some time now, I don't have any feel for yellow as being the "paused" color.  (And such may be irrelevant to Mac/Linux users you may be trying to lure to Windows.)  The yellow color used on the speed-charts depicted above that looks more like a slow-progress warning color to me.  Graying the section out as disabled would make sense personally to me, as gray usually indicates (to me) a disabled/suspended state, which is effectively what a file-copy pause is.  (Or even maybe just a gray-dulled shade of the active green color, indicating that this file-copy is still healthy, just paused.)

Understanding that this is all subjective, etc., etc., etc.  But real-user studies, if not already done, could be very useful here if it does turn out that the color-choice significantly affects many users' first-impression understandings of what those colors mean.  ("Oh, that's paused," as opposed to "uh-oh, something's really slowing down this copy.")

IAC, not something I'll freak out over, but something IMO to consider.  :-)

Thanks!

Daniel D's comment is true. That is nice if we can resume copy after restart or sleep mode, or shut down.

@mobiletonster,

Great point about preserving file-system access.  Agreed.

Please make Windows hash files and give us a CRC, MD5, SHA1 etc.  I very frequently have to recopy large files.

Just as already some people mention. A queuing functionality as Total commander would be a really nice improvement.

Nice job so far!

Both changes are great, but i would improve the names collision resolver, instead of clicking on the chebkbox, i would allow the user to click in the image, or some like the w7 names collision resolver that allows you to click that giant button that contains all the info.

Saludos!