You can now drive content on a second display from your tablet without ever having to attach a mouse. The virtual touchpad lets you do more with a tablet and a second screen – just connect to another monitor, PC, or TV, go to Action Center and tap on the “Project” Quick Action to extend your screen. Use it just like you would a physical touchpad to control content on the connected screen. To enable it, press and hold on the taskbar and select “Show touchpad button”. A touchpad icon will now appear in the notification area (just like Windows Ink Workspace does), and tapping on it will bring it up the virtual touchpad.
Fun little feature.
It is indeed a nice little feature and one that many people that give presenations from a Surface (or Windows Phone) on a Beamer will enjoy.
In general that blogpost is worth a read. You can see that Microsoft is actually working together and caring about their users from the way it was written. Very different from the past “Ivory tower” mentality that dropped a release every couple of years and posts “have you tried turning it off and on again” solutions on very technical questions and then closes those as resolved!
Some examples from that blog:
* This build can be used for the Bug Bash. We wanted to take a moment and say THANK YOU for participating in the Bug Bash alongside us and providing great feedback. Engineering teams are actively going through your feedback, understanding the issues, prioritizing, and then determining what next to do.
* If you used the previous ‘date change’ workaround to update to Build 14951 or Build 14955: Please don’t use it any longer!
* Enhancing the Address Bar in Registry Editor (PC): We were really excited to hear how excited you were about the new address bar in Registry Editor, and based on your feedback, we’ve already incorporated two new features:
1) You can now use CTRL + L to set focus to the address bar – while we already supported ALT + D, we recognize that some people prefer this keyboard shortcut instead, so now you have the option to use either one
2) You can now use shorthand notation for HKEY names – you told us that when sharing registry paths you always use shorthand notation (HKCU) instead of typing out the full HKEY name (i.e. HKEY_CURRENT_USER), so we should support them in the address bar, and you know what? We agree! You can now just use “HKCRâ€, “HKCUâ€, “HKLMâ€, and “HKU†instead of typing or pasting the respective full name “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTâ€, “HKEY_CURRENT_USERâ€, “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEâ€, or “HKEY_USERS†into the address bar.
The last one is a bit more generic, but shows that Microsoft is still interested in improving things that should just work but give no glory to fix:
* We’ve updated our migration logic so that going forward from Build 14965, preferred UAC settings, startup shortcuts, and File Explorer folders that had been pinned to the Start menu will all now be preserved across upgrades.
You can also clearly see from the changelog that Microsoft sees Mobile as just a small variation of the Desktop version. They run the same code and apps so they get the same updates and fixes. But they do care about uncommon cellular issues as well.
(Still waiting for the “Phone” part to merge with Skype/Messaging and then just become an app that can run on all devices with cellular capabilities
Edited 2016-11-10 10:52 UTC
Humanity is back!
Nice!
Working together? Caring about their customers? Really? Because we’ve had to open tickets with them that turned out to be issues caused by updates they themselves have released and not patched. I can get you the kb numbers if you want. Adding whiz-bang features while breaking enterprise functionality in Windows Server is not caring. It’s just a shift in who they want to appear to care about.
By the way, the cost for them to tell us it was their fault? $500. At least we run WSUS so we can just deny that update, but that’s not the point. And our Windows 10 machines that run build 1607 still go crazy with “The stub received bad data”, whatever the hell that means. But oh sure, at least they can be used as a touch pad now! Wonderful! That really fixes everything!
Edited 2016-11-10 15:04 UTC
Well, if you are going to treat a company that you are relying on for work so bitterly until they fix everything you are not going to have a lot of joy at work.
Please stop treating Windows as 1 guy. The guys that are adding the Explorer NAV-bar or the Virtual Touch Pad are not the ones writing Server Patches and nobody over there is actively trying to break Enterprise functionality, but bad things happen during patching. This isn’t new in any way. I still remember a SharePoint Service Pack that accidentally removed activation so after 30 days of running in trial mode all Enterprise Features got disabled and thousands of SharePoint sites basically stopped working!
I just installed a Server 2012 and I now have 205 updates installing (which I assume is just the first wave). In newer versions I have a monthly Cumulative Update that installs in minutes instead of hours
That means they should improve patching/updating and they are clearly working on that. Windows 10/2016 is the first version of Windows where I recommend an upgrade instead of a clean install in the majority of cases.
BTW: That “The stub received bad data” seems to come from the monthly update that installs but doesn’t automatically reboot. Just “have you tried turning it off and on again” and everything works again. This IS an issue that Microsoft should fix! But it is still better than having machines reboot automatically after installing updates without saving work.
They’re releasing more and more cool little stuff in a relative silence, it would have been Apple everyone would have been cheering loudly this incredible technology step forward that brings so much improvement to computer usability, wow, fantastic job Apple.
Stop it, it’s Microsoft taking the lead again. Like the Studio.
If only Microsoft Research would actually produce real products and gadgets instead to keep them boxed and let other companies catch all the glory.
Actually, people in Microsoft Research (mostly academia) used to publish papers but now they are encouraged to also publish apps under the “Garage” label: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/
It also seems that Nadella actively monitors what is happening there and picks some of his favorites to productize them (HoloLens, Skype Translator) much quicker now.
(Disclaimer, I met my wife during her internship at Microsoft Research Asia. We both don’t work for Microsoft)
I’m quite happy these technologies would actually hit the shelves at some point in time, sooner or later. It’s a shame Microsoft did so many researches just to dry the usual cash cows (Windows, Office and Server) without trying to diverse its activities. Not being a corporate culture, when they tried the phone market, they failed. Just hope they’ll be able to open their chakras and goes the friendly way, since Google officially revoked their “don’t be evil” moto.
I’ve got a couple of Windows Tablets (one little Atom based one in the style of a Nexus 7 and a Surface Pro 2) and I’ve been using an on screen touch mouse from a third party for, like, 2 years. It’s cool that it’s baked in (as it always should have been), but it’s not groundbreaking.
I can see this being used professionally and personally but I have a hard time getting attached to Windows anymore since version 10 constantly jacks with me and my employer by constantly changing our settings and deciding what apps we want to use.
Constantly? I have never had this happen after Updates, only after Upgrades (8.1 -> 10.0.10240 -> 10.0.10586 -> 10.0.14393, so roughly once per 6 months) which don’t migrate all settings. If you have that more often you might be running Insider Preview builds that are installed like upgrades.
Nope. Regular Windows 10 Enterprise install. My big example is Acrobat XI. I have to constantly set it to the default because Windows 10 will change it to Edge or a web browser. I know XI is old but usage and licensing costs prohibits us from going to newer versions. Management preference stops us from switching to a new product.
No, we’re not. I’ll back up the previous poster. Even minor build upgrades do such nasty things as turn Cortana notifications and pop-ups back on and rearranging my default apps and taskbar. Believe it or not, some of us actually have legitimate problems with Windows 10. Maybe you don’t mind your stuff getting changed on you, but I sure do!
I do too, that is why we have scripts to set the settings the way we want. Modifying an running those scripts after major upgrades is expected. Having to deal with that after minor upgrades is not!