Microsoft respond to user feedback and are calling the software Windows 8 Beta again

authored a new post on the Microsoft development blog. Microsoft are responding to user feedback to both their blog posts and the Windows 8 Developer Preview. For example, they are making changes to the way files are copied and compared. An excerpt:

L. Brown said: A compare button to show if files are equal in the “Choose” dialog would be really great! Frequently, the reason two files have the same name is because they’re copies. Making a choice between two identical files is usually pointless – it’s unnecessary for a copy operation, and often unnecessary for a move operation. We looked at several methods of identifying duplicate files and decided that checking the file name, file size and date modified attributes was the most effective approach. They can be used to identify the vast majority of duplicate files quickly, efficiently, and with good backward compatibility compared to other methods like file hashes. In the beta(emphasis mine), we’ve added a new option to the detailed conflict resolution dialog. By checking the box in the bottom left of the dialog, you can filter out all files that match on name, size (down to the byte) and time (down to the granularity of the file system timestamp: 2 seconds for FAT, 100 nanoseconds for NTFS). The system will skip copying or moving these files. This functionality adds no additional time to the operation, works both locally and across networks, and on all types of systems and storage.

They added a diagram for emphasis: [caption id="attachment_12353" align="alignnone" width="560"] Windows 8 new Windows 8 copy dialog[/caption] Now, they have a bunch of interesting responses to user feedback and that’s interesting. More interesting to me is that Ilana mentions the word Beta no less than 10 times in the article. What’s significant here is that there has been speculation that Microsoft would call the new release of Windows 8 Beta the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It seems to me there are three possibilities here.

1. It will be called Windows 8 Beta and the speculation was off
2. It will be called Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the developers just call it Windows 8 Beta.
3. The decision to call it the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is recent and developers just dont care – easier to call it Beta.

Whatever the reason is, this is just trivia. The Beta will be out in a few weeks and we can put this guessing behind us. Oh one more interesting thing – one of the images used in their blog post was titled “1374.2—CP-blog-post—skip-hide_thumb_5B0EA288″. CP. Interesting.]]>