Windows 8 News and Features
2011 October 11 – 5:13 pm
For a little over two months now the Building Windows 8 MSDN blog has been providing an insight into the new features and improvements currently in development for Windows 8. If you have even a slight interest in an early insight into the next Windows release then the blog is the place to look.
If you don’t fancy reading through the all the posts on there then allow us here at Glo Networks to summarise a few of the features we’ve found interesting just for you.
Improved file management: File copy jobs (copy, move, rename and delete) make up a large percentage of Windows 7 command use. As such Windows 8 looks to improve these functions. There’s a new centralised copy interface (no longer one dialogue per copy job, all will appear in the same) which has new monitoring and control tools, including the ability to pause individual jobs and a real-time throughput graph.
Improved “File Name Collision”: This is the situation that arises when copying a file to a location which already contains a file with the same name. The new conflict resolution dialogue displays the files from the source on the left and the files in the destination on the right. There’s a thumbnail image for each file, as well as information (modified date, size etc.) to help you make the decision on which file to keep.
ISO and VHD Access: ISO’s (virtual DVDs) and VHD’s (virtual hard disks) are now mountable natively in Windows 8. Simply double click the file and it will appear under Computer as either a DVD drive or hard disk, allowing easy access to the contents.
Hyper-V: Formally the domain of Windows Server editions, Hyper-V will be enabled in Windows 8. Hyper-V is a machine virtualization technology that will let you run more than one operating system at the same time on the same computer. One new Hyper-V feature developed specially for Windows 8 is the ability to use a wireless connection for your virtual machines to connect to the network.
Metro: This one’s a biggy. Windows 8 will have two user interfaces (UIs) available. Firstly the Windows Desktop UI that we know and love from previous versions of Windows makes a comeback, with improvements and new features aplenty. But available alongside this, or even instead of this should you prefer, is the new ‘Metro’, app based, touch friendly, UI. If you’ve seen the UI on the Zune devices, or the new Windows Phone (both interfaces are also called Metro) then you’ll already have an idea of the look and feel of this new UI. The idea is to bring together the power user capabilities of the PC and the more casual, app centric focus of tablets into a single device, with no compromise of the capabilities of either.
This is just a small selection of what has been discussed on the Building Windows 8 blog, there’s much more information on there and it also offers a way to give your feedback (via the comments section and the forum).
We’re excited to see what other new features and improvements will be present in the new OS, and will certainly be taking part in the open beta when the time comes. Keep an eye out for our thoughts and opinions in the future!
