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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Notmyusualid - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
To be honest, I only logged in to say I thought the article could have done with half a dozen pages on the data mining & privacy issues alone.But Michael, or similar will be along shortly to tell me it is all in my head.
But my firewall logs say otherwise.
jardows2 - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Well, the article was about the update, and what has changed. There are plenty of articles from a year ago outlining your concern, so methinks you are just a hater.Daniel Egger - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
You're totally ignoring the fact that with update things got a whole lot worse: As usual Microsoft decides for you that for the things you actually still can opt out and have opted out before you probably wanted to opt-in with the update and is happily applying your changed mind to the configuration for you. Also Cortana can *not* be disabled; yes, you can sign-off but the option to automatically share your local searches with Microsoft is gone and instead all searches will be shared with Microsoft.Some of the changes are actually illegal in Europe (like the automatic opt-in to previously opted-out items) and at best dubious but as usual it will require a lawsuit before Microsoft decides to reverse the bogosity. Meanwhile all systems have automatically upgraded and applied the privacy downgrades -- clever. Hope some court actually slaps them with a hefty fine instead of just on the wrist...
Icehawk - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
I don't want Cortana, I want to be able to select my search engine, and so on - it's like MS is trying to go OSX by removing much choice from the end user - see their Store which I avoid like the plague. I am surprised they locked Edge into Bing, as I recall one of the many lawsuits they lost was related to similar issues back in (I think) the XP era. Also does this mean legacy IE is gone? If so I literally cannot update as one of my jobs requires the usage of a particular website which is not compatible with anything but IE and my other job's web portal and a few apps are the same.Brett Howse - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
IE is still there for exactly that reason.Daniel Egger - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
> it's like MS is trying to go OSX by removing much choice from the end userThis claim is getting long in the tooth without anyone seemingly being able to back it up. Please, in gods name, tell me as an "any OS" power user (mostly OS X throughout the day, though) where OS X is removing choice. The only OS allowing more choice than OS X would be Linux but for many this is actually too much choice...
jlabelle2 - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Does Siri allow to work with Bing? I think people are confused. In the meantime, Edge is allowing you to use your search engine just fine.Notmyusualid - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Daniel Egger explains it nicely. Read on...Gigaplex - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
That feature exists in Windows 7 too.Teknobug - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Reading that they remove the ability to prevent bloatware like Cany Crush Saga from getting installed, why are we being forced to have stuff we don't even want ot use?