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Microsoft Windows

Windows 11 is Getting Android Apps, Taskbar Improvements, and More Next Month (theverge.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Microsoft is planning to launch a public preview of its Android apps for Windows 11 next month, alongside some taskbar improvements and redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. Windows chief Panos Panay outlined the upcoming changes to Windows 11 in a blog post today, and they appear to be part of Windows 11's first big update. From a report: The taskbar improvements include a mute and unmute feature and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors. Both were missing at the launch of Windows 11, but Microsoft is still working on improving the taskbar further to bring back missing functionality like drag and drop. The upcoming Windows 11 next month will also include the weather widget returning to the taskbar, something Microsoft started testing last month. Microsoft is also redesigning its Notepad and Media Player apps, and both include dark modes and design tweaks that more closely match Windows 11.

The big new addition will be Android apps on Windows 11, though. Panay says this will be a "public preview," indicating that the feature will still be in beta when it's widely available next month. Microsoft first started testing Android apps on Windows 11 with testers in October, and the feature allows you to install a limited number of apps from Amazon's Appstore. There are a variety of workarounds to get Google Play Store running on Windows 11, but Microsoft isn't officially supporting this. Panay also shared a variety of stats about how important Windows has become over the past couple of years. Windows 10 and Windows 11 now run on 1.4 billion devices each month, and the PC market has experienced strong growth throughout the pandemic.
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Windows 11 is Getting Android Apps, Taskbar Improvements, and More Next Month More

Windows 11 is Getting Android Apps, Taskbar Improvements, and More Next Month

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  • "Improvements" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @10:55AM (#62209015)
    So adding unneeded bullshit to the taskbar and a stupid redesign of Notepad and WMP.
    How are these improvements.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Teckla ( 630646 )

      Windows 11 user here.

      Windows 11 is buggy in a million little ways. It's kind of maddening. I wish they'd freeze all feature development and fix the myriad bugs.

      • [\snicker] [\snicker]

        I've had that same sentiment since the 80s about MS Windows

      • Windows 10 is buggy in ten million little ways though. I am waiting for IT to sllow Windows 11 for some of these reasons that help sites claim are improved in Windows 11. Easier WSL integration with serial ports, USB, ipv6, and GUI. Independent desktops on different monitors. Remembering window positions and which monitors they should be on better. Etc.

        So...
        Windows 8 - start treating us like a phone, PC is dead!
        Windows 8.1 - whoops we're sorry, we'll try to fix things up for you desktop and enterprise us

      • Windows 11 is buggy ...

        It has all the bugs of Windows 10 plus new, improved bugs. But I think there's a change in design philosophies. My security software reports Windows 11 placing program updates in the startup folder every week: A poor security practice new to Windows 11. Like Apple, Microsoft wants only one way of accessing something, which makes the UI slower. Also, they want settings pushed down deep in the UI navigation/menu. Like Google, there's strict permissions and limited access to underlying files and folders.

      • Windows 11 is buggy in a million little ways. It's kind of maddening.

        No what is truly maddening is that Windows 11 reintroduces the same bugs that Windows 10 did at launch. It's like they use some old buggy code base for every new version and then go through and fix the same problems over and over and over again.

        I literally installed Windows 11 an hour ago and have spent the past 45 minutes identifying that GetICMProfile() function in Windows 11 is broken in the same way Windows 10 was meaning all my colour managed apps (including Chrome) show the wrong colours on the screen

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Yea, for me the fact they took away the ability to change the location of the taskbar and forcing you to use only icons on the taskbar are non-starters. Maybe do that instead of crapping it up with Bing ads.... sorry weather.

    • Define "unneeded". They are specifically talking about bringing back taskbar features which were *missing* from Windows 11 and something which the community at large (including Slashdot) heavily criticised MS about.

      So unneeded for you possibly, but for many people the state of the Windows 11 taskbar is a critical hold point regarding upgrading.

      Also what is stupid about creating an OS level policy for colour? Do you think it's an intelligent design that some applications ignore the OS colour settings? Again

    • I'm not sure why tech sites keep reporting rounding the corners of Notepad and adding a dark mode as a "redesign". I'd classify them as extremely minor tweaks.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        It looks like the rounded the corners on everything. Way too much, I'd say.

        The menu bar is pretty stupid too. They round all four corners instead of just the lower two on the first drop down. It looks unfinished.

        There is a ton of stuff they changed, so I'd say it's fair to call it a redesign. It's just not a good one. I had a very carefully arranged start menu that they completely destroyed. All my groups are gone and my icons scrambled. You can align the task bar items to the left, but you can't do

      • Because it's hard to get poeple excited about "they rewrote the internals of notepad and are ditching the outdated 16-bit oriented design". Because for some reason notepad is still the default text viewer on Windows (maybe that needs to change?).

    • It is called "la-la-la-la-la we can't hear you"

      MS will do what MS wants to do and to hell with the users just as it always has been.

      I wonder how much Amazon paid MS to get their app store as the launch app store?

  • and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors

    Is this really a feature that makes a huge difference in people's lives. Yes, I know Windows 10 displayed the clock on all monitors, and I'm sure some people are a little annoyed that it was removed. But it's hard to believe that small things like this even get mentioned. Are people really that inflexible in their work that removing a clock display causes them any amount of problems?

    • I think it is more about the lack of choice for no good reason.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        That and the new taskbar didn't offer any new features other than center alignment. Given how much got left behind from previous taskbar, it seems like they rewrote it, didn't finish it, and from the outside it looks like they had to rewrite just to center icons like OSX does, which seems a trivial change to require a rewrite.

    • Re:Wonders never cease (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @11:26AM (#62209111)

      Yes. Yes, they are. If you ever just sort of watch your coworkers, you'll notice that most of them will continue to do a task exactly the same as they were initially taught. It's the rare person who stops to think that maybe there's a better way, and even rarer that they will attempt to change the way things are done.

      As a general rule, people are resistant to change. Most of the complaints I've ever heard about Windows Me was that they rearranged things in the control panel compared to Win98 and that upset people greatly. Then XP was pretty reviled its first two years of life, largely because of the Luna skin. It didn't fundamentally change how anything worked, it just made them look different and that was enough. Vista was basically the same deal, it looked different, so it was bad. I've known Mac admins who complain about users who bitch endlessly if Apple decides to move something a single pixel from where it once was.

      And... we all have at least one little thing that bothers us a lot more than it should. Maybe there's a song that we just have an irrational and intense hatred of. Maybe people not coming to a complete stop at an intersection annoys you to no end. Something small that has an outsized impact on our mood.

      • Re:Wonders never cease (Score:5, Informative)

        by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:31PM (#62209267)
        My income is base on doing my job effectively. You start to fuck around with things that prevent me from doing it effectively I am the one that gets fired not Microsoft. I care more for my income stream than any fucker working at Microsoft. Hell if one of there employee were on fire, I would just walk away.
        If it is suppose to help me do my job even more effectively, it needs to be thoroughly and quickly demonstrated or it isn't.
        • I bet you get upset when the grocery store rearranges shit too. I know I do. I want to get in, get all my shit, and get out. I dont want to spend 1.5hrs in there. I have things to do. I even try to arrange my list of shit to buy in a front-to-back order so I am not having to repeat rows or scan the entire list every damn row. They claim its to keep you there longer to buy more shit. But in the era of global pandemics is fucking making customers linger a bright fucking idea?? So yea, I can sympathize with mo

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Part of that 'resistance to change' is due to current efficiency. Think of someone becoming good at a process as a local minimum energy expenditure. In order to make a change you have to expend energy to rise up out of that local minimum. The energy needed may be more than folks have available to make the transfer over to another, possibly lower, energy state.

        Also, there's Plato's Allegory of the Cave aspect - they do it that way because they don't know that there's another way to the point that they don

      • Sometimes little things can do a lot. Every time I open a new window on my work Windows 10 laptop the window insists that it must open on the "main" monitor of the laptop screen. So every time I must spend the effort to drag the window onto the large monitor and try to get it lined up to the top or side where I want it and not just haphazardly in the middle somewhere. Little bits of wasted time that add up.

        Or in Teams, I get asked "how come you aren't sharing your screen yet" and I have to answer "they mo

      • Yes. Yes, they are. If you ever just sort of watch your coworkers, you'll notice that most of them will continue to do a task exactly the same as they were initially taught. It's the rare person who stops to think that maybe there's a better way, and even rarer that they will attempt to change the way things are done.

        And... we all have at least one little thing that bothers us a lot more than it should. Maybe there's a song that we just have an irrational and intense hatred of. Maybe people not coming to a complete stop at an intersection annoys you to no end. Something small that has an outsized impact on our mood.

        Computers are nothing more than tools to get shit done. If you are going to be disruptive with change and you bring no value to the table to show for it then you are just wasting peoples time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rhipf ( 525263 )

      If you read the complaint comment on many Windows 11 reviews one of the biggest complaints is not having the clock on the taskbar of all screens (or at least an easy way to assign the clock to a specific screen). From what I have seen there was enough complaints that it looks like Microsoft is actually listening to its users and adding this feature back into Windows.

    • Yes. When troubleshooting voip issues with desk phones, you would be surprised how much people whine if the clock is blinking or wrong, or simply off by the exact time offset from GMT. On the heels of dealing with all their handsets losing registrations and not processing calls, they wont let a tech move onto the next user and get their phones working so they can also make calls. Theres a goddamn clock on the computer and their cellphone they use to check their Facebook newsfeed every 6 min instead of doing

  • It seems you can get two cancers at the same time.

  • I've been running Win11 for a few months now. It's not that big a deal, no matter how much Microsoft seems to think it is - and, yes, it looks like the changes were mostly cosmetic.
    But, of course, changing anything about Windows is automatically considered bad, especially here at Slashdot. Of course, that sort of logic means Windows should probably have never been developed beyond 3.0 (3.1 was the first version to include "New Technology" - they changed things, after all. Shouldn't have done that).
    I'm
    • Yeah, until they start forcing features that should only be found on sedans and station wagons into trucks and sports car.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mmell ( 832646 )
        So . . . back to 3.0, then?
        Y'know, I remember when Linux modular kernels came out. Thought it was a terrible idea - and I can still tell you all the things that're wrong with it - it was an unnecessary change to the Linux kernel and it changed the way I handled device drivers. All because some developer somewhere thought kernel modules made sense.
        Installed a new network card in a Linux server lately? :^)
        • Yes, or let me use my computer in the way I want, not the Microsoft approved way.
          • Go run Linux. You'll spend considerable effort making it exactly what you want it to be, you'll succeed, and you'll enjoy every minute of getting what you want the way you want it.

            Now, once you stop using Windows, I assert your opinion on changes made after you moved on to Linux is about as meaningful as a vegetarian's opinion of whether a T-bone is better than a Ribeye.

            Seriously, if you walked away from Windows a while ago, what are you complaining about? Did Windows take your favorite shirt and refuse

    • that sort of logic means Windows should probably have never been developed beyond 3.0

      I do not think that garbage OS should have made it that far.

    • People who know what the fuck they are doing are about to get shit on, again.

    • So youre saying 10 to 11 not nearly as broken as 7 to 8 then? I hated 8 and 8.1. 10 seemed ok. I find myself using the same tricks across the board in all OS now; open menu and start typing in search bar for the program name. Even do that on phones and tablets.

  • Combining the horrible cellphone UI experience with the horrible Windows experience. The last word in UI horribleness! What's not to love eh?

  • The google play situation is a big deal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:54PM (#62209345)

    For those that have never used an android device without play services running, a *lot* of apps even sideloaded will flat out refuse to execute without google play services running. It's not just missing out on play store apps, it's a presumed part of the platform for many apps.

    High chance of disappointment if you are hoping to run popular Android apps, without hacking around the issue (the writeups I've seen look too tedious to be worth my while)

    • Windows 11 will be getting the same Amazon Appstore [windows.com] that Fire tablets use. This means that any Android app developer that has ported its app to Fire OS will have already done most of the work of making it compatible with Windows 11.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Yes, but based on my experience, developer support for the FireOS variant of Android is rather lacking.

        I'm sure Amazon is hoping this partnership makes FireOS ecosystem worth more to developers to get them to bother supporting it.

  • OS = GUI? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by groobly ( 6155920 )

    Microsoft has convinced everyone that changing a GUI is the same as a new OS. Not only that, but absolutely everyone hates their "improvements" to the GUI.

    • In a very real sense, the Windows GUI is part of the OS. You can't install the Windows OS without installing the GUI. There are no real alternative GUIs. There is significant code in Windows APIs that implements GUI functionality. So there is no meaningful distinction between the Windows OS and the Windows GUI.

      Mac OS, iOS, and Android all share this intertwining of the underlying OS with the GUI.

      Philosophically, _should_ an OS include the GUI? That is debatable, and there are no doubt opinions on both sides

      • An operating system consists of the kernel (hardware abstraction, drivers, etc.) and the shell (user interface).

        So, of course the UI is part of the OS. It is a choice on the part of the OS designers as to how easy it is to change the shell, or to have multiple concurrent shells. Not being able to change it all is one of the valid options.

  • The taskbar improvements include a mute and unmute feature and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors. Both were missing at the launch of Windows 11,

    I seem to recall fvwm2 having both of these only a few short decades ago.

    But seriously, there is a lot about Windows 11 that takes a great deal of technical know-how. What is frustrating is the focus that tech journalists have on the most trivial aspects of an operating system. And of course it is also frustrating that Microsoft has always been pretty terrible at the fit and finish of their user interface. They get it right sometimes, but it's more like the old adage of a broken clock than as a result throu

  • But can they guarantee a seamless Android/Win 11 experience for all of the Android malware I have installed.

  • Say what? (Score:3)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:49PM (#62209521) Journal
    but Microsoft is still working on improving the taskbar further to bring back missing functionality like drag and drop.

    How is this possible? That function has been around for well over a decade yet somehow they didn't include it in their latest and greatest steaming pile?

    If something so simple is missing, they are paying their developers way too much money for this kind of incompetence.

    • Are you a developer? Have you ever built a new version of your code on new architecture?

      The reality is that the taskbar is a complex piece of software. Rebuilding it and making sure that every feature is brought forward, would be monumental and delay the release indefinitely.

      Incremental improvement is better than delayed perfection.

      • The reality is that the taskbar is a complex piece of software. Rebuilding it and making sure that every feature is brought forward, would be monumental and delay the release indefinitely.

        You would be correct about it being misled to expect immediate perfection from the taskbar if redesigning from the ground up were really how Microsoft did things. I'd be willing to bet that they actually started with the same DLLs and simply added new code over the old code, disabling drop-and-drop and reskinning the taskbar. That's how MS has always done things. Windows Aero was built on top of Windows 95's UI, for example, which is why the old Win95 UI was still available at least until Windows 8, if not

        • Microsoft has historically gone out of its way to preserve backwards compatibility with old apps. My company recently disabled Windows 2000 compatibility, and a bunch of apps broke. That's 21 years old! No, they don't go randomly disabling things like drag-and-drop.

      • Yup, if you think you have to deal with a steaming pile of legacy technical debt, just imagine being at Microsoft where they have so much technical debt that they've got the IMF on speed dial.

      • Are you a developer? Have you ever built a new version of your code on new architecture?

        The reality is that the taskbar is a complex piece of software. Rebuilding it and making sure that every feature is brought forward, would be monumental and delay the release indefinitely.

        Incremental improvement is better than delayed perfection.

        Except the taskbars functionality isn't about improvement, it's about locking down the PC and turning it into a walled garden drm laden consumer device.

        • Regardless of Microsoft's motivation, the outcome is the same. Somebody thinks it's an improvement, and decided to rewrite it. It takes a while to get all the details right.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rhipf ( 525263 )

          Ok, you got me curious. How exactly does changing the taskbar functionality lock down the PC? It's not like you could use previous versions of Windows without the taskbar. It isn't like the new taskbar somehow limits the programs that can be installed on the computer. So exactly how is the new taskbar locking down the PC?

  • I've been out of Windows since W7. The only time I see it on my hardware is just before I replace it with Linux. I get my day to day work done so much more easily that way. I wish my employers would do the same.

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