Windows 10 Anniversary Update: The Road To Redstone
by Brett Howse on August 2, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
New Features And Built-In App Updates
Dark Mode
The Anniversary Update also adds another feature to personalize the experience: Dark Mode. As the name suggests, Dark Mode changes the default color scheme to black. The built-in apps also set their color scheme based on this setting, including mail, the store, and more.
This is certainly a nice feature for personalization, but it’s also a smart idea with recent launches of PCs and tablets with OLED displays. Lenovo showed off their own theme for Windows 10 at CES, for use with their OLED laptops, which eliminates a lot of the bright white display aspects that desktops and laptops have become accustomed to.
Other apps, such as Edge, also include a dark mode but the toggle is in the app settings, so you can customize this the way you prefer.
Mail App
The built-in Mail app hasn’t changed much visually since it was launched, but it’s continued to gain features which were very much missing when the OS first shipped. For instance, the mail client originally shipped with Conversation View as the only way to see your mail. About a month after Windows 10 shipped, an update arrived which allowed you to set the view to the more traditional view of chronological order.
With the Anniversary Update, Microsoft has finally fixed another missing feature which was a huge inconvenience for many people (myself included) which is you can finally send mail as another address. The Windows 8.1 mail client supports this, Microsoft’s Outlook.com supports this, but until this update, the Windows 10 mail client was missing this. You could of course put multiple accounts into it, but if you’ve consolidated to one, you can now use a drop-down selection on the send address to pick any addresses configured.
OneDrive
The OneDrive experience changed dramatically with Windows 10. Windows 8.1 featured the ability to see all of your files in OneDrive, and only download those that you wanted to access. Windows 10 ditched that and went with a per-folder sync when OneDrive was configured. With the limited storage on many devices, this wasn’t always ideal. To compound matters, there was no app for OneDrive when the OS launched.
At least one of these issues is now gone, and while not tied to the Anniversary Update, there is now an app to access OneDrive. It does give access, and you can download files that you need, although it’s a traditional file-save dialog rather than just download it and keep the file in sync within the OneDrive folder like in Windows 8.1.
There were reports of placeholders coming back to Windows 10, but at least so far, there hasn’t been any official word of this feature coming back. Until a new solution is found, OneDrive is not be the integrated experience it was in Windows 8.1.
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Penti - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
That's what I read among other things, btw "XAML UI | Converted apps won't have a UWP XAML UI until they are fully ported to UWP." Invalidates some of the statements made on page 6. From what I know only hybrid applications can do a XAML UI with Win32 applications like browsers are allowed to do, since W8. This statement by Microsoft implies you need to manually port the whole app to UWP to use the UWP XAML UI.I guess this confusion is Microsoft's fault as they write "At your own pace, you can add UWP features to your app's package, like a XAML user-interface, live tile updates, UWP background tasks, app services, and many more. All of the functionality available to any other UWP app is available to your app." on another page, but statements like "All of the functionality available to any other UWP app is available to your app" are obviously not true either.
darckhart - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
http://www.cnet.com/news/eu-resolves-microsoft-ie-..."European Commissioner for Competition Policy Neelie Kroes on Wednesday formally announced a resolution to the Internet Explorer antitrust case against Microsoft. As part of the settlement, Windows PCs sold in the European Economic Area will now present users with a Choice Screen, allowing them to install alternative browsers beyond Internet Explorer."
sounds the same to me if they bundle cortana. and a large amount of folks were coerced into upgrading to w10, so yea there's that. and of course it's not restricted to pc. any platform running w10.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Times have changed. Windows isn't the monopoly it once was.Gigaplex - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
If you exclude tablets and other recent portable form factors, Windows is still a monopoly in the conventional PC form factor space.lmcd - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Chromebox? Remix OS?leopard_jumps - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
The Anniversary is more beautiful . Chrome and File Explorer run faster than on the previous build .Token2k8 - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
I'm going to give it some time and see if it gets better but for now I notice the performance of my Surface Book is starting to choke a bit since I updated earlier today. I have the i5, 8gb, with Nvidia GPU. I notice a lot of delay on the web browser and even doing stuff on the desktop.HollyDOL - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
So... PIN doesn't work and needs to be removed and added back again. And Aster (multiple users running side-by-side on one computer) doesn't work. The later is no suprise and will get fixed soon. PIN is a shame though.theuglyman0war - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
What is meant by Windows as a service? How is an operating system a service? And why would I want an operating system to be anything but a transparent home for applications and files that I can organise in directories?Agent Smith - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
...all that DirectX 12 goodness and still no Video Wallpaper?