Windows Insiders have been anxiously awaiting the release of a ‘major’ new Insider build of Windows 10 and after a few delays, Chief Windows Insider, Dona Sarkar hit the big red release button today. Build 17063 for PC does indeed have plenty of new goodies, including the Timeline and recently announced Sets features, along with upgrades to Cortana and a plenty of bug fixes.
Timeline
Timeline introduces a new way to resume past activities you started on this PC, other Windows PCs, and iOS/Android devices. Timeline enhances Task View, allowing you to switch between currently running apps and past activities. The default view of Timeline shows snapshots of the most relevant activities from earlier in the day or a specific past date. A new annotated scrollbar makes it easy to get back to past activities.
There’s also a way to see all the activities that happened in a single day—just select See all next to the date header. Your activities will be organized into groups by hour to help you find tasks you know you worked on that morning, or whenever. If you can’t find the activity you’re looking for in the default view, search for it.
Activities
In Timeline, a user activity is the combination of a specific app and a specific piece of content you were working on at a specific time. Each activity links right back to a webpage, document, article, playlist, or task, saving you time when you want to resume that activity later.
App developers are working hard to enhance their apps by creating high-quality activity cards to appear in Timeline. In this Preview release, you can see and resume web-browsing activities in Microsoft Edge, files you opened in apps like Microsoft Office including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and updated UWP versions of Maps, News, Money, Sports, and Weather.
Microsoft is encouraging app developers to update their apps to support timeline.
Microsoft Edge gets Fluent Design updates
Microsoft Edge now supports an updated Dark theme, with darker blacks, and much better contrast with all colors, text, and icons. This addresses many accessibility contrast issues, making the Microsoft Edge UI easy to navigate and more visually pleasing. As well, Microsoft Edge now supports Reveal on our navigation buttons, action buttons, buttons in the tab bar, as well as on lists throughout Microsoft Edge (such as in the HUB: Favorites, Reading, History, Downloads), making navigating Edge UI even easier. Based on feedback, Edge also gets an update to the Acrylic in the tab bar and in-active tabs, allowing more color to show through.
Sets
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced a new Windows 10 feature called “Sets”, which they say is just a development title and may change before this ships to non-Insiders. The concept behind Sets is to make sure that everything related to your task: relevant webpages, research documents, necessary files and applications, is connected and available to you in one click. Office (starting with Mail & Calendar and OneNote), Windows, and Edge become more integrated to create a seamless experience, so you can get back to what’s important and be productive, recapturing that moment, saving time – we believe that’s the true value of Sets. Starting with today’s build, Sets will be available to Insiders however because it is being introduced as a controlled study, not all Insiders will see Sets. Having this limitation repeated, will further annoy Insiders who really are signed up to get the latest builds to test the latest features.
There’s a bunch more on offer in this latest build, its actually one of the largest updates in a long time, certainly since the release of the Fall Creator’s Update.
Read more at blogs.windows.com/