Transcript
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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at five new Windows 11 features for the new year.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat. Happy New Year. I believe the last episode we did was, you know, my top five features for 2025, five features that Microsoft added to Windows 11. We did a bit on the last of the penultimate episode of Windows Weekly last year around the same topic. I discussed more features at that point, but you know, the top five features. So this train never ends, it keeps rolling. Microsoft is releasing new features through the Windows Insider program. They're going to make their way into stable, as I call it. And some of these are features we might have discussed, but I don't believe we've actually seen, at least on this podcast. And there's a lot more of them than what I'm going to discuss here. But these should be new in the sense that you might not have them yet when you see this recording or they will just be about to come out. It's going to be right around the same time. So, you know, we'll see how this goes. But you know the drill. And with Windows, unfortunately these days, you know, features get rolled out semi arbitrarily. Okay, the first one is one that I cannot wait to disable, and I will disable it after I'm done describing it. But it's something called the drag trace. So if you follow Windows 11 and all the updates we've been talking about, you know that one of the areas of Windows that Microsoft has worked on repeatedly is Share. Windows Share, right? And so if you grab a file like this, right click, you can click Share and you get the Share dialog. And this will change a little bit depending on whether or not you're in a OneDrive folder or just a normal system folder, you can access nearby sharing from here, whatever computers and devices are on on your network, it's fine. Microsoft didn't think this was good enough. And so they've added a feature called Drag Tray. So if you're familiar with Snap, you know that as you move the window around, because I've disabled that feature, because I hate that one too. But let me go into multitasking. Let me just put that one back on. I always turn this thing off because it makes me. It makes me crazy. But if you move this thing around, you get that little hint up at the top, right? So you drag it there and then you get The Snap layouts and you can choose which layout you want. Right. And so I disable that personally. But you may like that, at least you've seen it, you understand it. And so drag tray works the same way, but for files. Right. And so if I drag a file around, you get that same kind of drop down and it says drop here and you can pull it up there and then it will have some list of apps that should be apps that are compatible with this type of file. So this is an image file. This isn't a great selection of choices, but it is what it is. I don't even know what this will do. I can't imagine that will do anything. I'm afraid to even click on it. But you can also just go to more options and drop on that. And if you do, you get to the standard file Share dialogue. Right? So nice. All right, so that's fine. And I hate that and I am not going to disable it. And so this, this isn't a non obvious place. In fact, a lot of these features, as I think about this, that we're going to talk about, the settings for these are in kind of strange places in some cases. So if you go into the Settings app and then system there is a nearby sharing item and it's up at the top of here and so you can just turn it off there. Now if I go back to this file that's not appearing anymore and that's. That is what I want. So I'm going to leave that like that. But maybe this is a feature that will help you use Share. We'll see. We had mentioned this and I'm not sure if I was able to demo it. I know I wanted to do a file transfer to kind of show what that would look like. But Windows has supported a dark Mode Since Windows 10, where they've improved it over the years a little bit here and there. One of the big sticking points has been File Explorer because there are these dialogues that pop up that would still be the light mode dialogue instead of the dark mode dialog. Right. So they fixed this. And the way I'm going to show you this is I'll go into, I have a link to my NAS which has movie files on it. So they're kind of big files. So we can just kind of let that happen. But I will drag this to the desktop and when I do, you'll see that this file transfer dialog is now dark mode, right. Which is new. So that's great. So you don't get that white Burst of light, you know, in the dark, when you have dark mode going. The other one that's like, this is the Properties dialog or the Folder Options dialog. Right. So this is another example of a dialog and File Explorer that used to be in light mode, but now it's in dark mode. So you can finally see that it's working very well. It's nice. So that's good. And feature number three is actually a set of features. This is going to be a little hard to show on this screen, but let me. Let me do it this way. So I need to bring over just a window from the side here, and then I'll just go, I guess, to my own websites. Flashing a lot. That's fun. And, yeah, so we have some combination of graphics and text here. So this is a good option for this kind of thing. So if click to do. If you have a Copilot plus PC, I think this might be one of the top two features. Maybe hold down the Windows key and you get this kind of purple pink effect. I let go and then I can click on things. And when I do that, I get different options based on what it is I'm selecting. So I actually have multiple screens here. It's selecting things all over the place. It's kind of strange, but a couple of changes since the last time we looked at that one. This little toolbar here at the top is vastly simplified and much nicer. You have selection choices up here. So if you want to select it as a rectangle or a freeform shape or whatever, you can choose not to use this. There's a tutorial now. So if you've never used this feature, it is one of those things you almost have to kind of look into, because it's not really super obvious that you can do this. You can run a tutorial, and it. Well, it will run that automatically, but. So you can learn how it works. But if you haven't seen it in a while or you forget how it works, you can just access that tutorial there. There's also been some changes in the types of things you can do. So these. These are essentially actions. The big one for text is this integration with Copilot in Word. This is kind of an interesting gray area because Word is not part of Windows 11, but it's almost always installed along with the rest of Office on most Windows 11 PCs. A lot of people who use Windows have a Microsoft 365 account or subscription, but a lot of people don't. And one of the changes we don't really talk about this too much on this podcast. But outside of Windows, Microsoft is bringing more AI features to the Office applications as well. And they don't all require a subscription. Right. And so even if you don't have one or you're not paying for it, you'll get some capabilities through Microsoft 365. So they're starting to add what I'm going to call Microsoft 365 app actions into Windows because of this combination of things is something that people do a lot. And there are actions for images as well. This is. Oh, just work there. Literally every time I've tested this today, it didn't work. Okay, so there we go. So this one hasn't changed too much. But the interesting thing here is one, you get more actions directly and also the most common actions. This is true for text as well right at the top now. So copy, share, save as and then open with is common to the two. And that's kind of a nice thing because as people use this, they provided the feedback like, you know, it'd be kind of nice if we could do that kind of thing. Alright, so I'm going to get out of that and then let me open up the Settings app, which we'll be going back to again and again. And this is tied to, like I said, this app Actions feature. We probably did look at this at one point. It's starting to get a little more interesting. But if you go into app actions here, what you'll see as I expand these are all of those actions that you'll see when you right click on things in Click to do and actually elsewhere as well in Windows 11. So click to do is copilot plus PC specific. And looking at these features, a lot of these are as well. But drafts with copilot Word for example is and summarized with copilot or examples of features that don't require a copilot PC. It will work with any Windows 11 PC. So interesting. And we'll get back to my top five right after this message.