After giving its free e-mail service a new Windows 8-inspired coat of paint with Outlook.com—which has seen more than 10 million users sign up already—Microsoft has turned its attention to cloud storage service SkyDrive. Over the next 24 hours, the company is rolling out a new "modern" interface for SkyDrive's online component.
While Outlook.com didn't add many new features—behind the scenes, it's pretty much identical to Hotmail—SkyDrive has picked up a bunch of new capabilities in addition to its new appearance. In the Web front-end itself, SkyDrive is now searchable, including the ability to search for text within Office documents. File handling has been streamlined, giving users the ability to select multiple files and drag and drop them to move them between folders. Sorting is also smarter; there are new ordering options and a facility to save sort options on a per-folder basis.
SkyDrive's apps are being enhanced as well. Over the next week, Microsoft is rolling out an update to the Windows and Mac OS X SkyDrive clients. The new version will be faster at uploading files to the cloud and will use less processor time when checking your system for changed files.
There are also some improvements for developers using the SkyDrive API. Applications can now upload files of any type and photos of any size to the cloud service. Microsoft has added a JavaScript-based file picker to make it easy for Web applications to save and open files from SkyDrive.
Looking into the future, Microsoft promised to include a selective synchronization feature to SkyDrive, and in a few weeks, the company will be releasing a SkyDrive application for Android.
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