While the start of the Windows 10 Technical Preview was slow this year, the last few weeks are certainly making up for lost time. Yesterday Microsoft released Build 10061 to Windows Insiders who are in the Fast Ring that has a huge number of updates and fixes. The update was announced on the official Windows Blog by Gabe Aul and there is a laundry list of changes that Insiders will see in this build. Having upgraded my beta machine myself, I can tell you the improvements certainly are felt but there is still a bit of work to do before I will be putting it on my daily PC, much like Windows 10 for Phone today. Still, if you are an Insider and in the Fast Ring, get this update. It is worth it.
With Build 10061, here is what you will expect to see different in this update.
New Mail and Calendar apps: These new apps bring improved performance and a familiar three-pane email UI, with a toggle to quickly move between your email and calendar. Mail includes customizable Swipe Gestures, letting you swipe right or left to take actions like delete, flag, move or mark as read/unread.
Start, Taskbar, and Action Center improvements: This build introduces the new black system theme across the Start menu, Taskbar, and Action Center. The Start menu and Taskbar now have transparency and you can also resize the Start menu.
Continuum improvements: The Taskbar is now more optimized for tablets. Entering Tablet Mode causes the Start button, Cortana, and the Task View buttons to all grow in size and space out to be more touchable. Items in the Notification area also widen to improve touchability
Task View improvements: We’ve made several visual updates to Task View. We’ve refined the window icons, the close buttons, and the thumbnails. These improvements also apply to Alt+Tab and Snap Assist. Task View gets a new icon on the Taskbar too.
Virtual Desktop improvements: You can create as many Virtual Desktops as you’d like! When you hit the limit of your display, a new overflow experience now lets you access any one of your desktops.
There are also a lot of bug fixes in this release which you will want to get if you have been impacted by one of them.
- Fixed the issue where Indexing of new email in Outlook was not working.
- Fixed the issue with Hyper-V preventing you from enabling it.
- Visual Studio will no longer crash when creating a new Universal app project.
- Fixed a few issues in Project Spartan. You can now double-click on the titlebar to maximize. We have also made some tweaks to the alignment of the Favorites Bar so that the text and icons no longer appear partially below the bottom of the Favorites Bar.
And now for the bad news. Here are the known issues with Build 10061. Again, keep in mind this is beta software peeps so bugs are very much a part of the game.
- We know this one will be a bit painful but there is a bug with this build in which Win32 (desktop) apps won’t launch from the Start menu. The workaround is to use search to find and launch these apps and pin them to your taskbar for quick access.
- The Windows Store Beta (grey tile) and Project Spartan get unpinned after upgrading. You can re-pin them to your Taskbar from All apps on your Start menu.
- The version of the Mail and Calendar apps included in this build (17.4008.42281.0) have a known issue that causes every typed letter to appear twice. Which might be funny if it weren’t so irritating. We have fixed this issue with updated versions of the apps (17.4016.42291.0) available in the Windows Store Beta (grey tile). If you don’t open the Mail and Calendar apps within the first 15 minutes after logging in to your device for the first time after upgrading and your device is connected to the Internet, the apps should update automatically. You can also go into the Store Beta and check for updates manually at any time.
- Cortana will highlight things it will be able to help users with, but some of these features are not yet implemented and we are working to deliver them soon.
- There is a known issue where you might see a black screen with only your mouse cursor during login/logout. We have a fix for this coming via WU.
- Downloading music in the Xbox Music and Music Preview apps is currently broken. We also have a fix for this coming via WU.
- When you minimize an app playing audio, it may stop playing once its minimized.
- In Project Spartan, no selection highlight appears when selecting text in the address box. You can right click in the address box to cut/copy/paste and it will work as expected. We also have a fix for this coming via WU.
- Magnifier does not work when you put it into docked mode. We will also have a fix for this coming via WU.
Windows 10 is expected to be available later this summer and while there is certainly work to be done, that release is starting to actually look realistic. I still don’t think that a July release is realistic but if Microsoft keeps churning out updates every-other week, it could certainly happen.
Now about Windows 10 for Phone… 🙂
