The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Feature Focus

Closing Thoughts

The new pattern of a spring and fall (or fall and spring, depending on your location) update for Windows 10 has worked well for 2017. The Creators Update added some new features, and several under the hood changes, but also missed out on a couple of features that were originally promised to hit the early update. Luckily, there’s another update six months later to target, so missed features aren’t missed for too long.

After a relatively tame Creators Update, there’s a lot of great new features in the Fall Creators Update, including the much-missed OneDrive Files On-Demand, which, for me, could have been the entire update. It’s great to finally have access to all of OneDrive, even if you don’t have enough disk space to store everything, which is often the case when SSDs are generally too small for bulk file storage. After a couple of weeks, the new Files On-Demand feature has been flawless, without apps randomly crashing as they wait for files to be downloaded, which wasn’t the case back in Windows 8.1.

Mixed Reality was a major selling point from Microsoft, but it’s still too early to know if this is going to take off in any meaningful way. The hardware is still expensive, although there’s a lot more options now with Mixed Reality, and the benefits are difficult to justify outside of a few select use cases. The AR portion of Mixed Reality might have more of an impact, with the Mixed Reality Viewer where you can project 3D objects into live space. Microsoft has gone pretty heavily into 3D animation, and VR/AR, but the jury is still out on it.

The people-first experiences are where Microsoft can really shine, and the My People has the potential to be a very nice tool. It needs more app integrations to really take off, but early use has been promising.

Photos has also suddenly become very powerful, with the ability to create and edit videos right in Photos itself. Originally this was announced as a separate app, but rolling it into Photos seems like a smart way to get it noticed, and hopefully used, since it does some cool effects without a lot of work.

The new security features are very strong, and should help drive adoption of Windows 10 in the enterprise. But even for the home user, or small business, controlled folder access is a great feature to protect your most important data.

Windows itself looks better than ever, and Fluent Design has been a nice refresh of the look of Windows 10. The lighting effects and acrylic give a nice touch to apps that leverage it. We’re still not at the point where all of Windows, or its apps, have fully embraced Fluent Design, but the initial apps and settings that support it really do look great.

Edge has continued to improve, and this update’s addition of PDF annotation is a very welcome change. Edge was difficult to recommend as a daily browser for a long time, but feature improvements have helped a lot, and it’s now generally good enough for most tasks. There’s still some features not available in Edge that were in IE, or Chrome, but the list gets shorter with every update.

Overall, the Fall Creators Update has been a very nice feature update, building off the Creators Update earlier in the year. The naming convention still needs a lot of work, but that’s not a huge concern. The rollout for the Fall Creators Update has been quicker as well, so Microsoft must be getting more confident in their update process. If your machine hasn’t gotten the update yet, head on over to Microsoft.com to download it and check it out.