Stefan Mileschin

Overall, the Fall Creators Update is a nice set of improvements to Windows. Windows 10 continues to get better with each update. Its grab-bag nature continues to underscore just how Windows development has changed. As the Fluent work makes clear, Windows today is in some sense never finished. That's not something to be scared of; any piece of actively maintained, supported, updated software is in a sense "not finished." With the new approach to developing and delivering Windows, that "unfinished" nature is more overt than it used to be. I'm sure some of the semi-annual Windows updates will feel larger in scope than others, depending on how the development work is going; others will feel a bit smaller. Because so much of the ground work was laid in the Creators Update, albeit hidden from view, this feels like a smaller update. It's a list of relatively small and disjointed features, but I still really like this update. Especially the Fluent Design changes to applications are very welcome, and make Metro applications feel less... Dead? Less cold? They have more warmth now, which is definitely something missing from pre-Fluent Metro and current iOS UI design (not so much from Material Design, which is rife with colour and depth). The very, very subtle blur effect, the 'highlight' when hovering over buttons and menus, and the odd animation here and there really address the concerns of people who feel Metro takes the "flat" design trend too far to the extreme. As a sidenote, "flat" really is a terrible term, since none of these UI design styles are really flat. Fluent, Material Design, and whatever iOS has are actually anything but flat, and have far more Z-depth than anything that came before - but I digress. The emoji picker is really nice, but it baffles me why it's emoji-only; as someone with a deep, deep hatred for special character input on Windows, it baffles me that it doesn't include special characters. The new GPU panel in Task Manager is also very nice, and it feels like Edge is less flakey, too. All in all, a nice free update.

http://osnews.com/story/30051/Window...mall_chan ges