The next version of Windows is here! Well, kind of.
Earlier this month, Microsoft released a public preview build of its new operating system. The Windows 10 Technical Preview is available to anyone who wants it, and it offers a glimpse at the direction the Windows team is taking. The name of the game, it seems, is a revival of the desktop interface Windows 7 users know and love—and a scaling back of the Modern UI interface that was introduced with Windows 8.
In keeping with that aim, Microsoft has focused squarely on desktop improvements for this first preview build. While the final release of Windows 10 will support touch-enabled laptops and tablets, Microsoft says the touch functionality is “rough and unfinished” in the current build. The company is, instead, encouraging users to kick the tires on the new desktop goodness.
I’ve been using the Windows 10 Technical Preview on my own desktop PC for the past little while. Along the way, I’ve been jotting down my thoughts and impressions. I’m pretty pleased with what Microsoft has done, for the most part. There are more than a few rough edges still, but I get the sense the company has made a genuine effort to improve the experience for power users. And that’s a big deal.
Over the next few pages, I’m going to take you through the main changes the Windows 10 Technical Preview introduces over Windows 8.1, and I’m going to share my thoughts about each one. Let’s begin.
Cosmetic tweaks
Fire up the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and the first thing you’ll notice is probably the updated user interface. The cosmetic changes are subtle, but they’re hard to miss:
Windows now have much thinner frames that sit almost flush with the title bar buttons. One would expect this change to make resizing windows more difficult, but I didn’t really find that to be the case. The gripping area, where the mouse pointer turns into resizing arrows, is the same thickness as before; it’s just an invisible twilight zone around the window instead of a visible frame. Things can get a little weird when resizing from a corner, since you’re supposed to grab the empty space just outside the corner, but it makes sense once you get used to it. Mostly.
Drop shadows are also back in full force. The first time Windows, uh, windows started casting shadows was in Vista, and the feature lived on in Windows 7… before being largely eliminated in Windows 8 and 8.1. In Windows 10, the shadows are lighter than they used to be, but they’re also considerably larger, especially for foreground windows.
This change actually mirrors one Apple made a few years back. In 2011, OS X Lion similarly increased the drop-shadow size for foreground windows. The change was a little jarring at first, but it did help establish a clearer sense of depth on busy desktops. The practically shadow-less look of Windows 8 and 8.1, by contrast, feels flatter and often messier.
Microsoft has replaced some of the Vista-era icons with flatter, Modern UI-styled versions, as well. You can see some of them above. Another little cosmetic change is that, when opened, windows slide down into place instead of appearing to zoom in from the back of the screen. This is a fraction-of-a-second animation we’re talking about here, but it does contribute to Windows 10’s new vibe.
Of course, it’s still early days, and I fully expect Windows 10 to undergo further UI changes as the mid-2015 release time frame nears. I wouldn’t be surprised if, for instance, Microsoft wound up replacing more of the old icons—or if the jumbo drop shadows got dialed back a notch. Microsoft is making a point to solicit feedback from Technical Preview testers, and I’m sure some of those testers are absolutely horrified at the size of those things.
The new Start menu
Beside the UI tweaks, the most obvious addition to Windows 10 is the new Start menu, which replaces the Start screen by default on desktop PCs.
Microsoft first demoed the revived Start menu at its Build conference in April. At the time, the company promised to release it as an update for “all Windows 8.1 users” at “some point in the future.” Clearly, there’s been a change of plan. An upgrade for Windows 10, it seems, will be required for this feature.
The Windows 10 Technical Preview’s Start menu is pretty much exactly what we saw in April: a hierarchical app list with a search function on the left, mirroring the old-school design, plus a pane filled with live tiles on the right. The live-tile area can be resized and rearranged to the user’s liking. The menu can be made taller and wider, too, and live tiles can be added or removed, so there’s a fair amount of flexibility built in. It’s even possible to pin non-Modern UI applications alongside the tiles.
Unfortunately, some of the functions of the old Start menu haven’t been replaced. There’s no Control Panel shortcut, for instance. Since Windows 10 disables the Charms bar on non-touch-enabled PCs, the only way to open the Control Panel right now seems to be via a text search or by right-clicking the Start button. Not the most convenient.
Overall, though, Windows 10’s Start menu looks and feels much better than the Start screen. It’s particularly nice when I have to browse the programs list. The Start screen’s “All apps” section is pretty awful, since it takes up the entire screen and dumps app shortcuts in a completely flat list alongside help files and uninstallation shortcuts. Windows 10’s Start menu uses the same hierarchical list design as Vista and Windows 7, and it’s much, much easier to navigate.
Even searching for apps feels like an improvement. I often open programs by hitting the Start key, typing the first few letters of the program’s name, and hitting enter. Windows 8.1 lets me do the same thing just as quickly, but it brings up a full-screen search that briefly hides everything else happening on the screen. The Start menu lets me search for and open new apps without taking my eyes off chat windows, YouTube clips, and the like.
Making Modern UI apps usable
When was the last time you opened a Modern UI app? If you’re on a desktop PC, it’s probably been a while—and, if you’re like me, it may have been entirely by accident.
Modern UI apps aren’t always as polished as their iOS and Android counterparts, but that’s not why they’re so unappealing for desktop use. The fact that they take up the entire screen makes them unwieldy on large displays, and it also makes them difficult to integrate in a desktop multitasking workflow. Yes, Windows 8.1 lets you split the screen down the middle and stick a Modern UI app on one side, but the mechanism is awkward, to say the least.
Windows 10 eliminates this problem by making Modern UI apps behave much like their desktop counterparts. They open inside individual windows by default. They can run in full-screen mode, but only when asked (via the new Charms menu on the title bar). They can be resized (though there is a minimum height restriction). And, most importantly, they can be used alongside one another without requiring a song-and-dance routine full of awkward swipes.
In short, Windows 10 makes Modern UI apps usable without being detrimental to the desktop experience. That’s huge. That means some of us dyed-in-the-wool desktop users may actually get around to using Modern UI software on a day-to-day basis, either to replace certain websites or just to enhance our desktop experience.
Maybe this change will encourage developers to make more and better Modern UI software, too. I certainly hope it does. The current selection in the Windows Store is missing some big names, like official Gmail and YouTube clients, and it’s full of obscure offerings with unencouraging user ratings. Even high-profile, highly rated apps tend to be pretty barebones and bland-looking. But heck, what else do you expect when Modern UI apps are prohibitively awkward on anything other than a tablet?
Task view
Some of you may remember Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows XP. That was the closest we ever got to seeing first-party virtual desktops implemented in Windows—until now.
In its current form, Windows 10’s Task view works an awful lot like OS X’s Mission Control. Click the icon in the taskbar, and you’re presented with an at-a-glance overview of all currently open apps and windows. An “Add a desktop” button at the bottom allows you to create another workspace, which can be filled with its own, separate collection of windows. Task view lets you switch between the two workspaces and add more if you so wish.
Now, let’s say you have two virtual desktops: A and B. From desktop B, none of the apps open on desktop A are visible. However, the taskbar icons for those apps have little translucent strips under them. Click any one of those icons, and you’ll be tossed back to desktop A. Only apps that can support multiple instances can be open on multiple desktops.
All of this works pretty seamlessly in practice. That’s not to say a little more polish and extra functionality wouldn’t hurt, though.
One feature Microsoft hasn’t yet borrowed from Mission Control is the ability to drag apps from one desktop to another. Right now, the only way to do that is to right-click the app inside Task view and navigating a context menu. Some keyboard shortcuts and touchpad swipes would be nice, as well. OS X lets users hop between desktops with four-finger swipes and customizable keyboard shortcuts.
The swipes in particular make multitasking very convenient on laptops. A lot of us have multiple monitors hooked up to our desktop systems, and going from dual 24″ panels to a single 1366×768 notebook screen can be pretty claustrophobic. The ability to swipe seamlessly between virtual workspaces alleviates the claustrophobia to a large extent. Task view is already most of the way there, but it wouldn’t take much to go all the way.
The updated command prompt
Okay, so maybe this isn’t worth a whole section. Still, Windows 10 represents Microsoft’s first effort to update the old-school command prompt in a meaningful way in, well, a long time.
The new command prompt supports pasting text via Ctrl-V rather than by right clicking, which is the only way to do it at present. That’s probably the most helpful change, but it’s not the only one. The new command prompt also features a new “Experimental” tab in its Properties pane. Some of the experimental options allow command prompt windows to be made translucent and to be resized horizontally, all with wrapping text. Similar features have been available in terminal prompts for Linux and OS X forever, so it’s good to see them in Windows, finally.
That said, there is one small catch right now: in the current build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, only the administrator command prompt supports the experimental settings. The non-admin one, which is the default, refuses to apply them. Oh well.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, those experimental settings apply to the PowerShell console. Developers and scripting gurus won’t be left out. I’m surprised Microsoft isn’t taking steps to retire the command prompt in favor of PowerShell altogether, but I suppose stripping away legacy features has never been the company’s forte.
Miscellaneous stuff
Before we wrap up, let’s look at a couple of more minor additions in the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
File Explorer windows no longer bring up “This PC” by default. Instead, they present the user with a “Home” section that lists favorite locations, frequent folders, and recent files. The left pane has also been updated to display all currently active storage devices, including hard drives and optical drives. Don’t worry, though—optical drives aren’t listed unless they’ve actually got discs in them.
Then there’s the search button on the taskbar. I’m not sure why it’s even there, since it basically duplicates the functionality of the Start menu’s search field. Both search functions let users look for local apps and files, and they support online searches via Bing. Also, weirdly, both methods bring up Bing search results in a Modern UI app… which then opens up whatever you click on inside a browser window.
Yeah, I’m sure that will get ironed out in future releases.
I wouldn’t mind the search button being taken out altogether, though. The currently implementation feels redundant and, frankly, a little pointless. It doesn’t look like there’s a user setting to excise it from the taskbar, either—although at least that seems likely to change, based on the user feedback Microsoft has gotten.
Conclusions
So, that’s the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
In many ways, this new operating system seems more like a return to the drawing board than an incremental upgrade over Windows 8.1. Perhaps that explains the choice of version number better than other theories.
Windows 10, in its current form, feels to me like what Windows 8 should have been, had Microsoft not been overzealous in its attempt to shoehorn a tablet interface into a desktop operating system. The full-screen tablet UI is still there for those who want it. Heck, there’s even a setting to bring back the Start screen in the current Technical Preview build. But the Modern UI interface isn’t being forced on anyone, and the best parts of it can be enjoyed within the confines of the familiar desktop.
I’m curious to see how the operating system shapes up over the coming weeks and months. As long as the pendulum doesn’t swing too far the other way, and Microsoft doesn’t ruin things for tablets and touch-enabled PCs, this could be the best Windows release since Windows 7.
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