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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  • Zingam - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link

    My laptop hangs on boot if it went sleeping or hibernating.
  • Hrel - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link

    Fist page: "had gone to far and toned them back." should be "too"*.

    I'm still skeptical AF about Microsoft. They seem to be in bed with the US Government, NSA especially. Bill Gates has a history of backroom deals, so him being back at the company isn't comforting. The "anonymous" telemetry data is a problem no matter what you do with it so long as ISP's even have the option of data caps. Not to mention the ongoing issue of broadband in America being slow, hard to find, overpriced and just unavailable for ~80% of the geographic area of the country.

    But, I will read the rest of this with an open mind.
  • Hrel - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link

    Finished it:

    Positives: They added the BASH shell.

    Negatives: literally everything else in the article.

    Fuck.
  • IntelligentAj - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    Am I the only one who didn't have issues installing the update? I downloaded and installed it in about a half hour with no issues
  • mastacow53 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    I installed it on 4 computers, one being an Atom powered, 2g ram, 2009 netbook. I had zero problems.
  • ummduh - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link

    Maybe? I went right to it from 8.1. Took several hours of research to get the installer to work. In the end the fix was to disconnect from all networks after it downloaded/verified, but before it started to install. Kept getting 0x8005007...8? Some such error that had tons of hits and an equal number of "fixes"..
  • slyphnier - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link

    how to get/open WDATP things ? http://images.anandtech.com/doci/10537/WDATP.jpg

    first time after upgrading to anniversary update (win10pro), when login, i got greeted with WDATP

    now i look anywhere but can find it anymore
    based the screenshot, its Edge browser right ? so i need to access to a link ?
    tried security.windows.com but it didnt let me access it
  • RicheekD - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link

    I've got a Dell Inspiron 13, I upgraded to the anniversary update and had to immediately downgrade. The WiFi keeps disconnecting every 5 minutes.
  • Lerianis - Monday, August 15, 2016 - link

    Underhanded? No. The Get Windows 10 prompt was intended to nudge the vast majority towards getting a superior operating system to Windows XP - 8.
    It worked in doing that, I upgraded all my computers a long time ago to Windows 10 and have yet to regret for even one second doing that.

    Windows 10 is the bottom line best Windows OS to come out in the past 15 years and everyone should update to it as soon as possible, even if they have to pay to update to it.
  • ComposerX - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    Well. I said years ago with no more elp files for seven os's, Windows is like Mac in that the one is (even tablets are getting there), and if they to are working on a CPU (am sure they could buy AMD), you never know. I can tell you in Los Angeles. Many still use aluminum macs tweaked. Some have moved to PCS. It was really a bummer to find out a school I was interested in now switched to mainly s due to faster rendering. Man. Apple needs to be loyal to those loyal to them. Tired of face slapping by them. Or price taxes like $200 for a BLACK MacBook. Then I remember a MacBook came out that blew away the MBP. But they stopped production on that big time. No Macro soon. It may be a hack. As mboards have thunderbolt now.

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