Maybe even more important than the extra layout choices is that these layouts are saved and accessible from the app taskbar icons so you don’t have to re-create them after doing something else on the PC. Snap Layouts let you choose from a selection of window layouts (see above), easily populating them with app windows of your choice. Now comes the latest windowing convenience: Snap Layouts. (I’m still a fan of Aero Shake for showing the desktop.) Apple's macOS only recently added the ability to set windows to take up exactly half the screen, something Windows users have had for years. Windows 11 Snap Layoutsįor me, Windows has long been unmatched in its ability to position, size, open, and close windows on the screen to your taste. Later updates will let you expand the Widgets panel to fill the whole screen, and third-party content providers will be able to take advantage of this new feature. The new widgets deliver a personalized feed of news, weather, traffic, sports, and stock market data, powered by AI for customization and Edge for rendering. Widgets are making a comeback! Apple bolstered widgets in iOS 14 and iPadOS 15, and Microsoft dabbled in bringing back desktop widgets with the News and Interests panel in Windows 10. Dark mode, too, looks more consistent, and these materials change to reflect that mode. A couple of new materials join the translucent one called Acrylic: the opaque Mica, which is slightly tinted based on the background color and Smoke, which darkens other areas to make you focus on an important input region. More subtle are the transparency, animations, and clean icon design that represent an evolution of the Fluent Design System, which, though promised, never fully took over in Windows 10. The centered look may win me over, however, since it doesn't require you to move the mouse cursor across a full screen to launch an app from the Start Menu. In Windows 10 you get wide taskbar buttons for running apps that contrast with narrow icons for pinned apps.

I’m still not a fan of the always-narrow Taskbar buttons. Windows get tightly rounded corners, similar to macOS. The Taskbar icons are now centered and smaller like in Chrome OS, but the Start button is still to the left of the other app icons.

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Windows 11 new desktop