If you’ve been keeping your eye on the Windows updates recently, you’ll know that there was an Insider update that brought in a few new features. While this isn’t on the main Windows branch just yet, we can use these Insider updates to take a peek into what’s on the horizon for the operating system. With the October update just rolling out after months of constant hiccups, let’s take a look as to what Microsoft has in store for 2019.

New File Explorer Icon

This is probably not on the top of anyone’s desired changes list, but it’s still a welcome addition to anyone using a light UI theme! The old icon would blend in very well with toolbars that are cream or light yellow. Microsoft has added a bit of a darker gradient to the icon, so it stands out better in lighter themes.

Better Downloads Folder Sorting

When you grab a file off the Internet and save it to your Downloads folder, do you typically rename the file as you do so? If you don’t, you may be frustrated going through cryptic file names (some of which may just be numbers or dates!) to find what you want. With the 18298 update, the Downloads folder will instead sort items by the date they were downloaded, so the most recent download is always at the top.

Better Touch Keyboard

Microsoft reports that when a user gets up to speed with a touch keyboard, they tend to overshoot specific keys. As a result, they’re updating the touch keyboard so that there’s a small margin of error around certain keys. This means you should see less mistakes made if you type quickly with the touch keyboard.

Sign-in Options Refined

All the options for signing in used to be scattered around the settings, but with this update, it’s all consolidated within the “Sign-in Options” menu in Settings. That way you can customize everything about your sign-in security from a single page.

Start Menu Tweaks

The update brings in a new context menu that makes it easy to unpin folders from the Start menu. This allows you to change up things and clear the slate much quicker than before.

Notepad

The new Notepad will save files in UTF-8 without a Byte Order Mark by default. If this sounds a little confusing, don’t worry – all this does is make the .txt document more compatible with ASCII and the Internet. The title bar will show an asterisk next to the filename if the document has unsaved changes, and you can now send Microsoft your feedback via a drop-down menu.

Notepad also has some additional hotkeys added to it. Ctrl + Shift + N makes a new window, Ctrl + Shift + S opens Save As, and Ctrl + W closes the active window.

Up and Up

With Windows 10’s October Update just rolling out to people’s computers (at least, in a semi-fixed state!), the Insider build is already showing off what’s coming up in the future. Now you know some of the top features being implemented in this new update, which should be dropping sometime in 2019.

Which feature are you looking forward to most? Let us know below.

Image credit: Windows Blog

Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

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