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Hands-On Windows 198: Widgets Redesigned
00:20:47
Microsoft Embraces Minimalism in Windows 11's Big UI Refresh
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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at a brand new widgets experience for Windows 11.
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This episode is brought to you by Black Hat USA. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades, it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than 100 hands on trainings taught by practitioners who've actually deployed in live environments. Not not lecturers reading from slides and hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security, right AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hats briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch break, arsenal live tool demos, on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the war room screening. Black Hat takes place from August 1st to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room and we'll be there too. Prices rise on July 17, so book before then. Use code TWIT for $200 off your briefings pass@blackhat.com US-26 that's B L-A-C-K H A T.com US 26 podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT
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everybody. And welcome back to Hands on Windows I, Paul Thurrott. And this year we focused a lot on the new features that Microsoft is adding to Windows 11. The other improvements they're making to the operating system. We've looked at things like the new Start menu, the new Windows update, the new taskbar, et cetera, et cetera. But among those things, among those things that are kind of major user facing features, right, because there's a lot of low backend, low level work being done as well is a new widgets experience. So widgets has been the source of a lot of complaints in Windows 11. It's something that can be actually kind of interesting. But the way it's configured by default is so terrible, right? So this is the new widgets interface. This is going to be available in stable, so by the time you see this, you will in fact have this. There are a couple of things that are interesting here because they have new default configurations that are, as Microsoft says, quieter, they're less annoying is the way I think of it, or, or maybe more minimalist or whatever. But if you already have an existing computer and you Upgrade to this. I don't think you're actually going to get the new experience. The new configuration. You'll have the new experience, but it will be configured the way it's been. Right. So this is kind of a look at what it would look like on a new install. Okay, so if you think about widgets, you've got this little button here on the taskbar that's a weather forecast by default. If you mouse over this, the widgets experience appears in the current or previous now versions of Windows 11. There were two sides to this. Essentially there was a strip of actual widgets on one side, the widget board, and then there was a Microsoft Start feed on the other side, which is filled with low quality news and just terribleness. If you click on any of the things in here, it will run Microsoft Edge regardless of which browsers you default, which is one of the big annoyances. And it puts up these notifications by default or did where if there was a news story happening out in the world or a big weather event or whatever it might be, depending on how you have this thing configured, it would put up little red, you know, exclamation points, etc. Etc. So this thing has evolved over the years, but this is, I would say probably the biggest change yet. And the most interesting thing to me personally about this is the new default configuration is the thing I've been recommending to readers and listeners for years. You know, in other words, go into settings, turn off this hover thing so it doesn't just happen when you move the mouse over there. Turn off all the notifications. The weather thing is cool. Disable that start feed, which you cannot see here, right? And then you've got this weather forecast, which is nice, nice to see. And you just have widgets and the thing called widgets, you know, it's, it's the right. To me, this is the right configuration. So now this is what Microsoft is doing. Okay, so we'll take a closer look at this right after the break.
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Okay, so depending on how you do this, in my case, I had to configure it the way it's going to be by default on a clean install. But maybe you get a new computer, maybe you do a PC reset, whatever it might be, but you come, you've got a clean install of what, Windows 11. You're going to see widgets in two places right there on the lock screen as well. Well, I'm going to try to look at that toward the end of the show. That's a little harder, right, because it's on the lock screen, but. And then we've got this widgets experience built into the taskbar right on the default Windows 11 desktop. So we've got widgets. We've got one thing over here, widgets. We have a couple of widgets. This is. These are the things Microsoft provided oddly on this particular computer. I had more of these earlier. I don't know what happened to the other ones, but you can, of course add widgets the way you could before. They have a bunch of new kind of default widgets. Daily discovery, daily wonder events near you. These are the types of things that you will often see on the lock screen because these widgets are the same widgets they will use on the lock screen. So I could add these here. These are not particularly interesting to me, but you can go in here and kind of get that, you know, more traditional experience here with a bunch of different widgets. So, okay, widgets work much like they did before. I'm not going to get into this complexity because I don't care. You don't care. We don't have to worry about it anymore. But there used to be this notion of default widgets and pinned widgets, and they were different, but now they're all just widgets and thank God. But what that means is that we can arbitrarily move these things around, which was always possible with pinned widgets, but not with default widgets. Again, let's not get into it, but this is a much more kind of malleable user interface, which I really like. So that's great. Okay, so simpler in the ui. Awesome. We go into settings, also much simpler. I'm going to enable that Discover feed and the Start feed, I guess we're calling it, which is, I guess, is the language here, shifts, but it's a dashboard as Microsoft calls it. If you click on this, the store will open. You can see there's still just that one app in here. There are no other feed providers. So it's not like, you know, CNN or some new site is providing a feed that will plug into widgets, which would be kind of nice frankly, because the Microsoft one is terrible. But we don't have that. And what we can do is switch over to the, to the Microsoft one. So this is also updated, right? There are some widget like things here. I'm going to call the widgets at the top, which is interesting. But then you'll scroll down and we get into the new stuff, which I don't want to go into too far because it's still terrible. Most of the customization here is as it was before. You'll mouse over. You can say or I really like this. You can go in here and say I want to block this source. And then you can also click on this close button. And this is like a thumb down essentially. I don't know why they have different icons, but it does work similarly to the way it worked before. I'm going to turn it. Well actually before I turn it off. Let's go in here real quick. So now notifications, there's a couple more or one more thing in here. We used to have two options in here. Previous versions of widgets. We can now show badges. Badges are the little overlays that appear over the icon if there's a news event or whatever. We can show badges over here. This is the navigation bar if you wanted to do that. And then we can show notifications that are tied into the Discover feed. That one's kind of interesting because you might actually want to be alerted if there's a weather event because you have a weather widget. But you don't necessarily want to get a news thing out of this terrible feed. Right. So this is also kind of nice, right? Or at least better than it was before. But again, I like turning that off. I hate it so much. And as before, you can turn hover on. Right? And so I'll just do this real quick. You can't see that I'm not clicking on this, but as I move the cursor over it, widgets just comes up, right? I don't like that personally, but you can enable that if that's what you want. Okay, so that's pretty much widgets, widgets as the, you know, the built in experience in Windows 11. But remember there is this other widgets if you will and it's on the lock screen. So when I go into lock screen settings, I can turn up this little warning here. The default here is going to be to have a slideshow. No, it's going to be to have a Windows Show, Windows Showcase, Windows Spotlight. Sorry, which you're not seeing for some reason. So normally that's the option there. There's a couple of small, minor things here, but the new default, and it's fascinating, it's not even. One of the options here is to have just one widget, which is for weather, and that would be all you would see here. But like I said, they've got this daily discovery, today's moment of ncru. So I don't know why this has changed on this computer. This is happening a lot to me lately. But you'll see I cannot add a widget because on the black screen, the widgets appear on the bottom of the screen. You can only have four of them. So if I remove this, you'll see it just flipped and actually added widgets, or weather, rather. And the reason it did it is because this option is on. When this is on, it will try to fill this widget's area with as many widgets as it can. So it's going to go grab the next one. I don't know why those four were provided, but this configuration is more typical. If you turn this off and then you go in here and say, well, I don't need you. It's just going to stay there with the three widgets and that's what you'll see at the bottom of the screen. So let's put that back. You know, it just updates like that. Now to show you what that looks like, I can't go to the lock screen. You wouldn't be able to see it on the screen recording. But I did take images of this on a virtual machine. And it's not actually. Those aren't. I can't actually show you those because those are terrible because they've updated the widget capabilities on the lock screen and I don't actually have that in the virtual machine yet. So what I had. What I did instead was took some photos which are not going to be necessarily ideal, but it will give you an idea of what these things will look like. Right. So this is the next widgets experience. By the time you see this, this will be the current widgets experience. Right. So what we have here is that Windows Spotlight display. It's kind of a new look, you know, networking and battery icon. If you're on a On a laptop it's got these little info boxes like before. I'm not saying it will never happen again, but I haven't seen ads here. Remember this is one of the big problems. And then the default again is the single weather widget, right centered and this is what that looks like. Okay, so that's fine. I tried to zoom in there a little bit. But this is new to this version, right? It actually if you think about the lock screen as kind of a transient screen, which it is. And if you. And depending on the configuration of your computer, you might have it set up for Windows, hello, facial recognition, in which case, and you know, you tap a button, the screen comes on and you just kind of go by this, you'll never even see it. Or you could even have presence sensing capabilities where you walk up to the computer, it powers up, the screen comes on Windows hello sees you and you just, you know, you go by it. So it's easy not to even see this screen. And the other problem is if you click anywhere out here, of course the sign in screen appears, right. This goes away. And so it's interesting to me that they have these little interactive elements. Unfortunately, if you customize this widget or manage this widget that does not happen on the lock screen, you then will go to the sign in screen, you'll sign in and then that whatever the underlying window would, you know, would, would appear. If you go to manage widgets, it's going to go to the lock screen settings that we looked at personalization settings we looked at earlier. And then for this one I believe if you do customize widgets, actually going to go to the Bing website where you would customize what your default location is. And then just a couple of other things in here I believe I have. Yeah. So this is what it would look like with all four of the available widgets. It could be any four. Right? Any four that fit this size. Right. When we bring up widgets here, you can see widgets can be different sizes and this one supports medium which is this big size, but it also supports small and small is the only size that will work on the lock screen. So if you have a widget either pre installed or something you can get from the store that only supports medium or better, you won't actually be able to put that on the lock screen. So that's something that does happen. And then the final thing is this little media player. So this is again it's an interesting example of this is transient screen. It's super easy to click buy it but maybe you started media playing back whatever it was. This could be a, a video on YouTube or wherever in whatever web browser. It could be in an app, it could be an audio file of whatever kind. It could be music, podcast, audiobook, it doesn't matter. App, you know, website, whatever. If you leave that thing playing and you walk away from your computer or just locks, whatever reason it's on, whatever timeout value, this will appear under the widgets and give you some basic playback controls. And this is again, this is interesting because if you misclick this a little bit, the lock screen disappears and there is no way to go back to it. It will go back eventually, but when we get to that sign in screen, you're supposed to type in a PIN or password or do whatever Windows Low thing. There's no back button, right. So it's like I like the idea that you can interact with these things on screen. And I should say this is not new to this version, but it's just, it's a tough screen in many ways because you know, you might want to use this sort of like a smart display and have like a photo thing going. You get music playing. It's kind of a cool idea, but it's not necessarily the best experience. Okay, so there's that and actually I'll just show, let me see if I can make sense of this. Let me turn this thing off, turn this, get rid of that, Try to add a widget. So yeah, this one here is an example. So this casual game widget is only available in larger sizes. So you can't actually add it to the, to the lock screen. Same thing here. This one works fine because it's the right size. And then as you kind of go down the list, this one must offer a version that is that size, you know, the small size. So that's kind of interesting. But it's also the same widgets which it technically probably always was or has long been. But it wasn't obvious in previous versions of Windows 11 that these were the same thing. So that place where you can choose the widgets is a new to this release in, in the lock screen. But it's also the same list of widgets you get in the. In the widgets interface. Right. So when we go in here and do this, this is exactly the same window, it's exactly the same choices. The only difference is that all of them work in this widgets ui, but only some of them will work on the lock screen. Okay. So I think that's most of it like I said, you're going to be able to get this update by the time you see this. You'll just have it most likely. You know, Sometimes these are CFRs control feature releases, so it might take some time, but it will be broadly available by the time you see this. I have questions about defaults. Like I said, I suspect that if you upgrade as you would on a computer you already have, I don't know that it's going to change any of the settings for you. The exception possibly would be in here. I could picture them adding and adding just some default widgets here, but on a clean install you should only see weather like I said. So there you go. We got some new stuff. It's not. I wouldn't say it's earth shattering, but this to me takes an interface that before was barely tolerable and makes it into something interesting and something more akin to what I thought it should have been all along. And as I said up front, I like that they've adopted the configuration that I was always recommending anyway, because, you know, it's just not as annoying. It's. It goes from annoying to useful, essentially. So. So there you go. Thank you for watching. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can learn more at Twitter tv. H O W thank you to our club Twitter members. Especially if you're not a member, please do consider joining. You can learn more about that program at Twitter TV Club TWiT. Thank you. I'll see you next time.
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