Geof Harries

The Building Windows 8 blog is seriously awesome. As geeky awesome as it gets, especially if you use (and like) Windows as an operating system.

If you don't use or like Windows, that's cool, but you still have to appreciate how far the Windows 8 team has gone in turning their big ship around. As a software designer, I get stupidly excited every time the Building Windows 8 blog is updated with a new post because the writers provide so much information and insight into internal processes and design thinking. It's rare to come across this "big software design" stuff on the web, let alone from Microsoft themselves.

Out of all the Windows 8 details, screens and interactions that the blog has provided, my favourite remains Improving our file management basics: copy, move, rename, and delete. File management in Windows, even Windows 7, is at once amazingly powerful and astonishingly bad. With Windows 8, it appears they've improved file management in every way possible.

This single image - this one dialog - is my absolute favourite of the entire blog post series.

From the language and messaging to layout and typography, the Windows 8 design team has nailed it. This is exactly how I want file management in Windows to work.

Windows 8 Beta, you can't come fast enough, my friend.