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Ever find it frustrating trying to copy or move files in Windows? Then some long-overdue improvements in Windows 8 should be welcome news.

Admitting that file management or the "copy jobs" feature now in Windows can be confusing, Alex Simons, a program management director on Microsoft's Windows engineering team, yesterday revealed four enhancements destined to surface in Windows 8.

Contributing to the latest installment of Microsoft's ongoing "Building Windows 8" blog, Simons said that copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files are the most heavily used features in Windows Explorer, accounting for 50 percent of … Read more

Perhaps one of the more useful features implemented on computers is the ability to copy and paste items, allowing for the quick transfer of text, images, and other items between separate documents. Though this function is integral to many computing environments and tasks, there are some limits to the default clipboard in OS X and other operating systems, with the primary one being that it can only hold one copy instance at a time.

If you copy an item to the clipboard and then copy a second item, the first item will be overwritten so you will need to go … Read more

Do you know where that swoosh on your shoes came from? And just who, exactly, might be responsible for that plummeting ad man who magically avoids a messy death just before the start of your favorite TV show? How about that half eaten apple that may well be on the other side of the screen you're looking at right now? How did that come about?

"Designers do a lot of work in the shadows," says John Fiorelli. "The audience generally doesn't know where all this beautiful work comes from."

Five years ago, Fiorelli set … Read more

NEW YORK--Just after Steve Ballmer finished up on stage, I cornered some of the development team members and got a look at the copy and paste features that Microsoft said will come early next year to Windows Phone 7.

The current version of Windows Phone 7 lets you move the cursor, but not highlight any segment of text. So I imagined that the copy and paste feature would build on the cursor. Instead, it starts out taking advantage of the fact that, while not visible, the operating system does recognize individual words, something needed for the spell checker and text … Read more

In late May, a John Gruber blog post on Daring Fireball titled, Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks, finally explained to me why pasting headlines into the spreadsheet of stories I want to talk about on Buzz Out Loud each morning had become a pain in the neck. Tynt makes a utility that lets publishers modify what's put onto a computer's clipboard when the user performs a copy action, breaking usual computer behavior and upending user expectations.

As an example of how Tynt "breaks" copy and paste, go to Wired.com and copy headline text from the site, for example, "Deep-Sea Vent Discovery Sets Hydrothermal Life's New Depth Record," what you'll get when you paste it is instead, this:

It's the extra two lines, a blank line and the "Read More" text, that annoys users like me who are trying to fill out spreadsheets or forms with headlines, and who want the source links elsewhere (off to the side, in my case). I know it sounds like a minor complaint, but as Gruber points out, "It's a bunch of user-hostile SEO BS...Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the "copy/paste company" is a service that breaks copy and paste."

I agreed, and I put up a Twitter rant myself: "How to screw up cut-and-paste: http://bit.ly/cC34ok Daring Fireball on Tynt. Bonus: How to disable it."

My retweet of Gruber's post lead to a call from the Tynt marketing team, a meeting, and the eventual realization that the people at Tynt are not jerks, that they haven't broken the Internet, and that, in fact, they're sitting on a killer business model.

… Read more

When many Windows users switch to the Mac, one of the seemingly logical features that is missing is the ability to cut and paste items in the filesystem browser. Many people get used to this for organizing their files, and to see it missing on the Mac takes a little getting used to if you have frequently used this feature.… Read more

Brian Tong joins us to talk about the high points of yesterday's WWDC announcement and how the new iPhone 4 compares to current Android hardware. Also, the HTC Evo 4G breaks a Sprint record, Android tablets for $100 and Google Music... coming soon? Plus copy/cut/paste shortcuts and a review of DoubleTwist.

HTC’s Evo 4G smartphone debuts http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15228405

HTC EVO 4G sets new sales records for Sprint http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/07/htc-evo-4g-blows-away-sprints-first-day-sales-records/… Read more

For power users and other keyboard-shortcut fanatics, Keyboard Maestro is one of those apps that--once you've used it for a couple weeks--you wonder how you ever lived without it. (And, in fact, Keyboard Maestro mimics the functionality of many other much-beloved productivity-enhancing apps, even including the Classic Finder.) Keyboard Maestro's Program Switcher and Window Switcher make cycling through and managing open applications and windows a breeze, and its Clipboard Switcher lets you work with and store an endless number of clipboards. Keyboard Maestro also supports Growl and AppleScript, with the option of automatically pasting in script results at … Read more

LAS VEGAS--When it comes to copy and paste, Microsoft argues that there's a better way of doing things on the phone.

Rather than include the feature in Windows Phone 7 Series devices (something many users say they want), Microsoft argues that a better approach is simply to offer so-called smart links--which recognize a block of text, such as a hyperlink, phone number, or address, and allow a specific action to be taken. For a phone number, such "smart links" would allow the number to be dialed. An address might get pulled up in the mapping program, while … Read more