Another sign of the slow but steady move away from the Windows Live brand is that the former Inside Windows Live Blog at Microsoft has been renamed to Inside SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Messenger.
The first post on the newly designated blog is about updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows and Mac that have started to roll out today.
Today we’re also starting to push updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows desktop and for Mac, which will appear automatically on your PC or Mac over the course of the next week or so. You don’t need to do anything, as the updates occur automatically in the background.
Here are a few of the improvements and fixes in the updates:
- SkyDrive for Windows desktop will power a cool new feature in the upcoming Windows 8 Release Preview, available the first week of June. Right from the Photos app in Windows 8, you can fetch photos stored on your other PCs that have SkyDrive installed – no matter where you are or how many terabytes of photos you have stored on the PC you are accessing. We’ll have more to say about this shortly, so stay tuned.
- SkyDrive for OS X Lion no longer shows an app icon in the dock when running. We’ve definitely heard the feedback that it wasn’t necessary.
- Your SkyDrive folder now updates more quickly and reliably when changes are made on other devices, including SkyDrive.com.
- The limit on the number of total files in the SkyDrive folder created by the apps has been raised from 150,000 to a whopping 10 million! This should unblock some power users from easily adding lots of files to their SkyDrive folder.
- We made lots of smaller bug fixes to improve overall reliability.
That first bullet is probably the one getting the most attention with this update. One of the things that went away with the new SkyDrive App was the ability to just sync any folder directly between PC’s.
A lot of tech sites seem to think this may be the first stage in a return to that PC to PC direct synching but now focused on specific directories such as Pictures as this one will use.
I guess we will have to wait and see the details on that and where it goes from there.
The update to the Windows 8 version of the SkyDrive app also makes me hopeful that we are going to see some significant updates to the included apps in Windows 8. That will be a welcomed thing after using the rough around the edges app previews for the last few months in the Consumer Preview.