Today, Microsoft released the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, which adds a number of interesting new features to Windows, and adds even more Fluent Design to the user interface. The Verge lists the 10 biggest new features and changes, while WindowsCentral has a longer, more detailed review of the update.
I’ve been running the final version of this update for a while now on my workstation and my Surface Pro 4, and this is one of those updates that adds nothing but welcome changes and new features. There are two ‘features’ that really make a huge difference to me, and which have me mildly excited about Windows for the first time in ages.
The tentpole feature – Timeline – is really nice, and allows you to easily scroll back in time to look at applications, documents, websites, and more that you opened in the past. It’s like the history feature of your browser, but instead of just websites, it also covers apps and documents, while also combining the histories of other Windows machines you own. Timeline will clearly raise a number of privacy concerns, so luckily, it’s optional, and you can turn it off.
The second ‘feature’ isn’t really a feature per se, but more a clean-up of the Windows UI that’s clearly an ongoing process. Microsoft is adding Fluent Design to all of its applications, and it’s slowly adding it to core parts of the operating system as well, such as the Start menu and the various applets. Fluent Design adds some much-needed depth and distinctiveness to the otherwise flat user interface, and has nice, unobtrusive animations and highlighting effects that make using such a flat UI a lot less… Cold?
It feels like the next big step in the “Fluent Design-ification” of Windows is a big one: Explorer. While Microsoft is replacing more and more old Win32 parts of the operating system with new, modern Fluent Design counterparts, Explorer is the one big holdout that’s still fully Win32, looking horribly out of place among all the fast, new, and responsive Fluent Design parts of the operating system. I can’t wait for a modern replacement.
All in all, this is a no-brainer update that makes Windows better, so unless you have some specific reason to hold out on updates, go ahead and install it.
Thom Holwerda,
Can someone in the know clarify if this feature runs on the local computer or in microsoft’s data centers? My opinion about this feature resolves around the answer to this question, haha.
If this runs locally, then I don’t think it’s a major privacy concern; I’d say it’s a cool feature to have as part of the operating system.
However, if this was implemented to run on microsoft’s servers, then yikes, there are some serious privacy concerns! It really should be explicitly opt-in, otherwise many users are likely to have their personal data collected without their knowledge or consent.
You can either save the Timeline locally, or have it sync across devices. Device sync is disabled by default, too.
Or, you can disable it entirely.
Edited 2018-05-01 06:13 UTC
Drumhellar,
As long as data remains on the owner’s computers and in their control, then it seems pretty cool!
It updated and was rather enthused to find one can now hide/unhide desktop icons, hurrah. Also, it didn’t rejig my default apps for once.
Can’t say any of the new features excite me. Hopefully it’s more stable
Never been a Windows fan but love the new ability to route audio per application. That is great feature.
spihunter,
While I abandoned the commercial prospects for my OS a long time ago, this is one feature I wanted it to have. In fact, I wanted it to go much further than audio: every hardware/software interface defined by the OS would be routable, the idea being that every device you own should be enumerable through a unified protocol and available across the network without special drivers.
It would kind of be like SMB network shares, but unlike SMB, it wouldn’t be limited to just files and printers, you could take any device and virtually reconnect it across the network. This would include things like displays, keyboards, mice, printers, cameras, audio, etc. So wouldn’t matter which computer you plugged your device into since they’d all be network transparent.
If you wanted one application to use local sound, but another application to play sound on a PA system connected to another computer, you’d simply hook it up virtually. No special drivers or programming required. If you want to video chat using a remote webcam instead of a local one, there would be no need for software to support this feature, you’d just select a remote webcam in the OS device browser.
Some software (aka “manycam”) can do a limited form of this by using drivers that implement virtual devices. But I think ideally device sharing would work out of the box in a standard way without requiring any special software & drivers.
So…. Plan9?
Drumhellar,
Actually I’m a big fan of plan9. Plan9 would have been a good platform for many of my ideas.
Part of me wishes the mainstream industry had gotten behind it instead of unix clones. Although unix was revolutionary in it’s own right, it lacks a lot of refinement that the plan9 engineers were able to make thanks to hindsight.
Linus could have made linux better than unix too, a lot of things about posix suck after all. But one of the ironies is that linux became popular because it was a clone first and foremost. If he had made made a better system, it would have been less popular (like plan9 for that matter).
I came here to also suggest that, apparently / judging from the earlier post, you wanted to make Plan9 ;P (why not use it?
Port a modern browser engine to it, it’s the main thing it lacks) …except when you want to make something like Singularity, IIRC 
(or maybe those are ideas about the same OS?)
Not a fan of the new theme. I run Windows 10 on an older HP laptop and can hear the fans running faster because of all the new translucency effects. I thought that Microsoft did away with the Aero effects because of their battery drain, but now that Apple added translucent side bars to their finder windows (among other things) we need to add it back to Windows too. Also, I can do without the weird button border effect, especially since it seems to just stop working randomly when the mouse is moved on and off the window.
Edited 2018-05-01 14:22 UTC
Presumably File Explorer will also get the new fluent theme because it’s starting to look dated compared to the rest of the OS.
Edited 2018-05-01 15:37 UTC
Only been running the update for a few minutes and already spotted a couple of GUI glitches.
– Within Settings, the min/max/close window controls sometimes render with a blue background.
– Again within Settings, when trying to resize the window from the bottom, this sometimes drags the entire window around the screen with the mouse rather then resizing the window. Weird!
Hangs with fan at 100% and black screen at reboot after update… a hard power cycle away and it’s backing out the update.
Edited 2018-05-02 03:59 UTC