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.
Out of everything added in this update, the only thing you comment on is the cosmetics and the emojii. Why am I not surprised?
Out of everything mentioned in this summary, the only thing you comment on is the cosmetics and the emoji. Why am I not surprised?
I don’t give a rat’s ass about virtual reality, and I’m not an artist – the 3D creation stuff is way out of my league. The other big change is the introduction of the new design language. Other notable improvements are, indeed, the improved emoji input, further improvements in Edge, and the new GPU panel in Task Manager. That’s it.
Edited 2017-10-18 18:13 UTC
From my understanding, people serious about 3D creation do not give a damn about this update either.
I really appreciate the Task Manager GPU panel, it will hopefully become very handy with CUDA development.
For the rest, I cannot shake the feeling that Microsoft is pouring a lot of efforts into area that nobody cares about: Edge, Cortana, Store, pen-writing, etc. It all feels very uninspired, as does the “Creators Update” name.
With Windows Mobile dead and the non-existent Edge market shares (and does any human actually use Cortana?), I mostly feel pity and disappointment at each Windows 10 update. It feels they are trying to shove stuff down my throat I do not need nor use. Another attempt at convincing me I should use Windows Store?
I wish they’d start focusing on the core OS again. The GPU panel and the Windows Subsystem For Linux are just glimpses of awesome things they could achieve if they really wanted to.
Edited 2017-10-18 20:42 UTC
If you wanted to monitor GPU load, there are already better tools to do so. This feature is a nice to have, but my reaction is “it’s about time”.
Well, is you think that update looks rather pale, from its official announcement, maybe it is justified for its unofficial added functionalities.
Using NVidia NSight or AMD’s CodeXL is really the smart thing to do for GPU monitoring during development.
What about for Intel GPUs? ;P
I care about Edge, Cortana, Store, and Pen-Writing…
Who are you?!?!
Edited 2017-10-20 06:35 UTC
Nelson.
No, I am not Nelson
ha
I would think that the re-incarnated “OneDrive Files On-Demand”, Continue on PC (Android and iOS as well as Windows Mobile), supporting Swipe Keyboards, Your People (although currently not supported much) and especially Controlled Folder Access (anti-cryptolocker) should be on that list as well.
I am suprised that Thom would actually make a “That’s it” statement like that AND receive a score of +7 for that post.
MS is providing these updates every 6 months so don’t expect the same amount of change as we got every 3 years before. They are also providing these updates for free for all supported devices (99% or so) not just for 1.5 to 2 years but forever.
This looks to be a really nice update. Nothing breaks, nothing slows down, several nice features added, other features improved, nothing to complain about
No, flat is the correct term. Yes, there are multiple layers to the way a window is generated. But, the end result, is nothing more than a single flat image, with very little indication of what is what. Is that a text label, a text link, a text button, or just a piece of text? Is that stuff on the left movable or is that part of the interface?
The biggest issues with iOS, Material Design, and Metro is the complete lack of visual cues for anything. You shouldn’t NEED to mouse over everything in order to get animations, highlights, and whatnot in order to determine what’s clickable and what’s not. You should be able to just look at something and see that.
Fluent is a nice step in the right direction, but it’s an indication of just how far in the wrong direction we have already moved.
Wow, someone who gets it! Yeah the ‘flat’ design has bothered me for some time. UI use really has gotten pretty terrible. It’s why I continually go back and play with older systems, like TOS and Workbench, to see what they did right (and wrong) vs modern operating systems.
Though I’ve gotten really used to my Gnome set up where I don’t have icons strewn all over the desktop. I now have a strong hatred for desktop icons. It’s so much quicker to hit the ‘meta’ key, type in something you’re looking for and then hit enter than it is to look over rows of icons (because everything in Windows wants to put an icon on your desktop, sometimes if you tell it to or not) and then open it with that. Good thing is that Win10 and Gnome-shell both function in this same way, though there are definitely better tags for Gnome-shell / Linux.
Though.. why does it force me to open up Edge if I ask for an app that it happens to have a ‘suggestion’ for?
You know, you can always delete them afterwards…
Myself, I have a radical solution for desktop clutter: right-click -> view -> untick “show desktop icons”
(I still use desktop folder as a kind of temp folder for everything, but I don’t see it on the, well, desktop 
)
Thom (and others) do you know about these keymaps? Life changing!
https://github.com/adunning/Mac-Keyboard-Layouts-for-Windows
WinCompose is really good at typing specials characters : https://github.com/SamHocevar/wincompose
So for those of you scratching your head wondering why it is not working, it may be that you are using a different locale.
The word is “autumn”. It’s spring on my side of the world. Do Americans actually ever think of anything outside of their little part of the world except for war?
What would the United Statesians have to do if we weren’t going around and blowing the shit out of things?
Paul Thurrott was mentioning that…guess what, they concluded there isn’t really a good way to deal with it so just accept it and move on.
A good way to deal with it would be not to name releases based on seasons. It’s that simple.
Or maybe just not worry about it, and focus on the multitude of real problems that exist?
Then maybe let’s just ditch computers in general and concentrate on more “real” problems like starving children in Africa or something?..
Not just American, in fact not American at all. Its Northern Hemispherian. A Good deal of America is South, I imagine they know their own weather and how it correlates with the calendar.
Edge did come a long way, however it’s still a hassle to find good extensions for it within the Store (that is when it works).
Not sure what Microsoft is doing but keeping the Store services down for a couple of weeks when everyone was complaining that they couldn’t search, install, update or simply do anything in it is a weird way to promote your platform..
Not even going to touch the “functionality” of running dedicated Linux / Unix hosts from vendors when you try to promote at the same time your own bash implementation (which it’s still not enabled by default in VS)..
Consistency is lacking on so many levels .. but I’m still not sure if it ever shinned.
Edited 2017-10-19 07:54 UTC
uBlock and Lastpass, Pocket….what else does someone need that isn’t just an extension whore?
Edge has to do something better than the current browsers to get people to switch in the first place. Simply having a few of the popular extensions isn’t going to be nearly enough; it is going to be like the app situation on Windows Phones a couple of years ago, where Windows Phone fans called Android and iOS users who had applications that they couldn’t have, “app whores.” That mentality doesn’t serve anybody well.
That being said, there is a tremendous opportunity for Edge to grow its userbase the next few months as the Mozilla people completely shit on Firefox extensions with 57. I was a NoScript user who used Mozilla since the milestone days, and a few months ago, I forced myself to discover the per-site whitelisting for JavaScript interface in Chrome. A great tool, and now I have no need to move back. That, along with the only extension I use, https everywhere, is something that I haven’t been able to do in Edge, by the way. I guess that makes me an extension whore?
w8, does it work on OSAlert?
(and I wouldn’t call what you write about in 2nd part of your post a “tremendous” opportunity – last I checked, Firefox itself also has somewhat meagre usershare)
Right, Firefox^aEURTMs popularity peak was the five years between 1.0 and the release of Google Chrome. But I would think that by including the Linux userlands in the Windows Store now, Microsoft is targeting he same type of people who would still be using Firefox after all of these years.
Or something like that. It^aEURTMs hard to say who the target is anymore, now that everybody else has given up on the desktop.
BTW…the Linux Subsystem is to bring tooling to windows for people that need them, not run a full blown *nix platform atop windows.
Azure offering a Linux solution is totally within their new corporate vision.
I thought he was complaining that there was more than one way to do something.
Which is true, but honestly WSL does so much more than any other Bash available on windows. Its a good choice, and basically everyone should just ignore anything else. having options that no one uses isn’t a big problem for most people. There are probably a million ways of doing things in window already, that we probably don’t know of ( well except that win super site guy).
A little inconsistency here and there is usually a good thing. It means that the designer knows the limitations of the paradigm.
“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.”
It’s supposed to get a replacement soon, from what I’ve read on other sites, but, for now, I’ve been using BabelMap, which ain’t perfect, but is still much better than Charmap.
http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html
I care that my updates work, sadly I came home to find that after an automatic update, I could no longer access my SSD and ended up with a constant boot loop as windows tried to repair itself to no avail.
This time around I have disabled the preview updates.
Microsoft just needs to do what they did with Windows phones and deep six Metro. I can^aEURTMt think of anything worse that was created for any desktop OS in the last 15 years other than the whole fiasco known as Vista, or maybe ME. Going back further I would have to add Windows 1 and 2 which I actually might still have copies of as examples of what not to do.
Microsoft needs to decide one way or the other. Either go all in on Metro or go all out on it.
If you don^aEURTMt know what is wrong with Metro as a second Windows interface inside of Windows. How about making doors for your house where you have two totally different kinds of doors to go through the same kind of door ways. Now do you understand how student this is?
When you type in mail or Outlook in a computer and you have Office 365 installed. WHY is it trying to bring up a Metro version of Mail instead of Outlook.
Microsoft … idiots. Look in a thesaurus. The words will reference each other.
PS: I know and use and support multiple types of computers and OSs every day. That is my day job where I make my money. I know computers and OSs. So I know what I^aEURTMm talking about. Apple has some pretty dumb things too. But maybe a 7 out of 10 where Metro is a 19 out of 10.
For somebody who “know and use and support multiple types of computers and OSs every day. That is my day job where I make my money. I know computers and OSs. So I know what I^aEURTMm talking about” you seem to just follow the party line… Vista laid the groundwork for universally loved Win7, which was basically “Vista SE” – there was very little reason to upgrade to Win7 from service-packed Vista. And I never had problems with Me… (but I had new hardware so I didn’t mix VxD and WDM drivers, which probably was the cause of most issues)
VxD drivers was not usable at all for anybody with windows 2000 and later.
Right, but this didn’t stop too many people from trying, with WinMe …after all, “it was just another 9x, right?” …well no, the changes were slightly too great, old tricks often borked the system.
(though I’m guilty myself of shoehorning old drivers on new OS …but succesfully!
I managed to load old Video for Windows drivers meant for NT 4.0 for my Quickcam VC LPT (with CCD, good for astrophotography) on… Win2003, and it worked fine, though I had to use a wrapper to translate VfW stream into WDM one which could be used by newer programs such as Skype; I didn’t try that webcam with newer Win OS, though it should work on Linux …but finding a motherboard with LPT and PS/2 (for power) has become a problem :/ )