Windows Archive

A nifty little feature I didn't even know existed.

Eventually, the hammer's gonna drop: all new laptops and PCs will ship with a Win32-less version of Windows. The signs are clear for anyone to see, and as a Windows developer, you'd do good by preparing yourself.

I've got two fun The Old New Thing stories for you today, starting with a story about Windows' ZIP file support.

You'd think Windows would eventually start supporting other archive formats as well, but no.

Do I need this? Nope. Can I afford this? Probably not. Do I still want it? Yes!

I love the fact that Microsoft is making products like this. It'll probably be a niche product few of us ever get to experience, but whatever the company develops for and learns from this product will surely benefit the rest of their hardware and software offerings.

At its Build developer conference yesterday, Microsoft showcased what's coming for its Fluent Design overhaul of Windows and its applications, and there's definitely a lot of good news for people who like Fluent Design, developers, and yes, even power users.

Microsoft will be adding Z-depth, dynamic shadows, and more to Fluent Design to further reduce the flatness of the user interface, using these to create a visual hierarchy inside applications. Developers will also get access to a new and improved way of managing colours inside their applications; instead of having to manually colour each control, developers now have access to more global colour control. Microsoft is also adding blurry transparency, shadows, and Z-depth to context menus.

A new contextual command bar flyout - similar to how Office applications will show various formatting options after selecting text - can be populated by developers with various contextual controls that make sense for the content in questions. Microsoft claims that it has designed this contextual bar so that it will work with either a few options, or lots and lots, making it useful even for very complex applications.

The biggest new feature, however, is one that will be welcomed by many. As it currently stands, Fluent Design is clearly a very touch-oriented interface, with large controls and lots of whitespace, making it challenging to build and design very complex applications with lots of options, buttons, and controls. Therefore, Microsoft is adding two denser layouts to Fluent Design - medium and compact. With the compact layout you can design applications that are just as dense as classic Win32 applications. You can already try the new, denser layouts in Windows Mail, which was updated today to add these new options.

The whole Fluent Design talk at Build is an interesting watch, as it also hints at the further Fluent Design-ification of Windows, including showing off file manager context menus.

The decline of Windows is definitely overblown in the media, but Microsoft did miss the next big thing by a thousand miles, and mindshare-wise, this has had enormous consequences. It hasn't hurt Microsoft much financially though, and you can be sure Windows isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Today, Microsoft released the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, which adds a number of interesting new features to Windows, and adds even more Fluent Design to the user interface. The Verge lists the 10 biggest new features and changes, while WindowsCentral has a longer, more detailed review of the update.

The tentpole feature - Timeline - is really nice, and allows you to easily scroll back in time to look at applications, documents, websites, and more that you opened in the past. It's like the history feature of your browser, but instead of just websites, it also covers apps and documents, while also combining the histories of other Windows machines you own. Timeline will clearly raise a number of privacy concerns, so luckily, it's optional, and you can turn it off.

The second 'feature' isn't really a feature per se, but more a clean-up of the Windows UI that's clearly an ongoing process. Microsoft is adding Fluent Design to all of its applications, and it's slowly adding it to core parts of the operating system as well, such as the Start menu and the various applets. Fluent Design adds some much-needed depth and distinctiveness to the otherwise flat user interface, and has nice, unobtrusive animations and highlighting effects that make using such a flat UI a lot less... Cold?

It feels like the next big step in the "Fluent Design-ification" of Windows is a big one: Explorer. While Microsoft is replacing more and more old Win32 parts of the operating system with new, modern Fluent Design counterparts, Explorer is the one big holdout that's still fully Win32, looking horribly out of place among all the fast, new, and responsive Fluent Design parts of the operating system. I can't wait for a modern replacement.

All in all, this is a no-brainer update that makes Windows better, so unless you have some specific reason to hold out on updates, go ahead and install it.

I know that especially among the kind of people who read OSNews, "animations" in UI design tends to be a very dirty word. I very much do not belong to that group of people, since I adore proper, well-thought out use of animations in UI design, such as the fun little touches in Material Design, the pivots and slides in Windows Phone's Metro, and yes, the brand new flourishes in Microsoft's Fluent Design, which is currently making its way to Windows 10 users all around the world.

I'm fine with being in the minority here on this one - to each their own.

Microsoft's various rings for Windows testing seem to be really paying off. They give testers a lot of flexibility in just how bleeding edge they wish to be, and they make it very easy to change between the various levels, while also providing people like me - who really don't have the time to actively test and report bugs - a safe and easy way to get big updates a few weeks before it hits mainstream.

So basically what Linux distributions have been doing for two decades.

He's not alone. I loved the way Windows Phone worked and felt, but sadly, it just didn't have the applications, and Microsoft's various transitions really hurt the platform too. Too bad - it was innovative and fresh.

Feature updates are the bigger updates to Windows 10, released twice a year, that are probably more akin to the service packs of yore than regular updates or full releases. Microsoft is improving the process of installing these larger updates.

For as much as Windows has problems, I really like that Microsoft is working on improving things like this. It would be very easy for them to set low-level work like this aside in favour of flashy stuff that's easy to show off in an ad blurb, so I appreciate the effort put in addressing less sexy problems like this.

A faster, less invasive update process is always welcome.

I doubt any of these changes will reassure people who refuse to use Windows because of privacy concerns.

While I'm sure this particular case is just some weird bug, it does highlight a real problem - what happens to a perfectly fine phone phone running a walled garden platform when its creator ceases to offer application store services? In an ideal world, such a platform would be opened up and set free, but I highly doubt that's going to happen here.

The reality will be that a lot of perfectly fine phones will end up in the trash.