What’s new in Build 14951

Refining the customization experience for precision touchpad (PC): Since last week, we’ve continued working in this space, and have another set of improvements headed your way. To start with, we’ve hooked up our keyboard shortcut picker, so now if you choose that option on the Advanced gestures page, you’ll be presented a recorder so you can capture your favorite key combo –  perhaps WIN + Alt + D or WIN + F to start with? Secondly, we’ve added a Change audio and volume option to the set of basic swipe gestures you can pick from. Finally, we’ve updated the reset button to now has a progress circle and display a check mark when it is finished. We’ve also heard your feedback from the last flight, and fixed a few issues including that the reset button wasn’t clearing the settings listed on the advanced gestures page, that the 4-fingure gesture graphic was visible on devices that only supported 3-contact points, and that some of the advanced gestures options weren’t working as expected. If you have any more feedback for us, please let us know!

Windows Ink Improvements (PC): Starting with this build, pen dropdowns in Windows Ink Workspace will let you change both color and width without having to open it twice. After you make all the adjustments to your favorite pen, start drawing right away and we will dismiss the dropdown for you.

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/protactor.png

We are also introducing Stencils. Windows Ink protractor tool combines functions of both protractor and compass into one – now you can draw an arc or a complete circle of an arbitrary size with little effort. A familiar two-finger pinch gesture resizes the protractor to the desired size and a degree readout follows your pen, mouse, or finger as you draw along the side of the protractor displaying arc degrees. In this preview build, ruler also got a small update – its degree readout shows a numerical value of the angle, making drawing angles even easier.

[ADDED] Inking in Photos: With version 16.1017.10000.0 of the Photos app just released for Insiders in the Fast ring, you can now harness the power of Windows Ink with your photos! Not only that, but when you save the ink, it replays what you drew, so you can share it as a still image or a video. Add funny comments or accessorize your friends – the sky’s the limit! To start inking, pick one of your favorite photos, and then tap the Draw option. You’ll now enter the familiar Windows Ink toolbar experience, where you can select a pen, pencil, and one new addition: a calligraphy pen! Once you finish inking, press the save button and the ink will dry, thus becoming part of the photo. This version of the Photos app also comes with an updated the cropping experience, and we’ve added a whole slew of new filters. Have fun, and we’d love to see what you end up inking – share your pictures with us @windowsinsider!

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/WP_20161001_19_50_04_Pro_Ink_LI.jpg

Simplified, more familiar camera interface (PC & Mobile): The Camera app received a big update this week for Insiders. We’ve redesigned the Camera interface for ease and accessibility. Check out some of our new features:

• Enjoy taking photos, videos, and panoramas with our higher-contrast capture buttons.
• Set a photo timer right from the camera dashboard with our new toggle control.
• Get to Settings faster! Now, launch into Settings directly from the camera UI.
• Access your camera roll with one hand from its new spot on the screen.
• Zoom more easily with the new zoom slider.
• Make sure you nailed the shot, with a more noticeable capture animation.
• Change between front- and rear-facing cameras with a more prominent button control.
• On PC, use the spacebar as a shortcut to take pictures.

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/camera-app-update.png

You can now experience the magic of living images on your Surface, now enabled on Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, Surface Pro 3, and Surface 3! With living images, extend your still captures with a snippet of video. These are created automatically whenever your shots feature motion—just navigate to Settings and turn on Capture living images.

And this release features a variety of performance improvements to enhance your experience. We’ve added faster shot-to-shot support, improved feedback for saving large videos to SD cards, and improved camera startup time, among other improvements.

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/camera-app-update2.png

Simplifying your developer experience (PC): We’ve done some underlying work, and now you’ll no longer have to reboot your PC after turning on Developer Mode! This means that you can start using Device Portal and Device Discovery as soon as the Windows Developer Mode package has finished installing, rather than having to reboot first.

Narrator improvements: This build includes a number of improvements to Narrator including multiple fixes to continuous reading when used in tables and on web pages, a fix for the Caps Lock + W reading experience so dialogs and other elements are read correctly again, and a fix so that reading hint text does not interrupt the reading of information by Narrator but comes after the main information is read. And Narrator now properly indicates when it is exiting.

Windows Subsystem for Linux: Today we are happy to announce two large updates to WSL!

• Official Ubuntu 16.04 support. Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) is installed for all new Bash on Ubuntu on Windows instances starting in build 14951.  This replaces Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty).  Existing user instances will not be upgraded automatically.  Users on the Windows Insider program can upgrade manually from 14.04 to 16.04 using the do-release-upgrade command.
• Windows / WSL interoperability. Users can now launch Windows binaries directly from a WSL command prompt.  This is the number one request from our users on the WSL User Voice page.  Some examples include:

More information can be found on the WSL Blog and the WSL MSDN page. Other changes and more information can be found on the WSL Release Notes page.

Other improvements and fixes for Mobile

• Following feedback discussing French punctuation rules, we’ve updated our French keyboards (with the exception of French (Canada), for which these rules don’t apply) to now add a space both before and after when using two-part punctuation marks, such as the semi-colon, the colon, the question mark and the exclamation mark.
• We fixed an issue resulting in the Camera shutter sounds entry missing from the Sounds Settings page via Settings > Personalization > Sounds.

Other improvements and fixes for PC

• We fixed the issue causing PCs that are capable of Connected Standby such as the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 to sometimes bugcheck (bluescreen) while in Connected Standby.
• We fixed an issue resulting in Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War (and some 3rd party games) failing to install from the Store with the error code 0x80073cf9 when the system’s app install location was set to drive with native 4k Sectors (or 4k sector sized drive).
• We fixed an issue resulting in larger Store games such as ReCore, Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3, Killer Instinct and Rise of the Tomb Raider possibly failing to launch.
• We fixed an issue where the console window (which hosts Command Prompt, PowerShell, and other command-line utilities) might not snap correctly to the inside edges between two monitors with different DPI scaling.
• We fixed an issue where all agenda items in the taskbar’s Clock and Calendar flyout were using the primary calendar’s color, rather than matching their respective calendar’s colors as selected in the Outlook Calendar app.
• We fixed issue where the Add PIN button in Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options was sometimes unexpectedly greyed out for domain-joined devices.
• We fixed an issue resulting in Groove crashing if you tried to reorder the songs in a very large playlist.
• We’ve updated our migration logic to now include custom scan code mappings. That means that going forward from this build, if you’ve used Registry Editor to remap certain keys (for example, Caps Lock key to null), that change will persist across upgrades.
• We fixed an issue Insiders may have experienced resulting in Adobe Photoshop Express crashing after clicking on the ‘correct’ button when trying to edit a cropped image.
• We fixed an issue resulting in .csv or .xlsx files downloaded from Microsoft Edge sometimes unexpectedly appearing to be locked for editing by “another user” when SmartScreen was enabled.
• We fixed an issue where enabling the RemoteFX adaptor for a Virtual Machine would result in it failing to power on with the error ‘Unspecified error’ (0x80004005).

Known issues for Mobile

• Signing into apps such as Feedback Hub, Groove, MSN News, etc. with your Microsoft Account if you sign out or get signed out of these apps will not work. If this happens to you and you cannot sign in to Feedback Hub, you can send us feedback via the forums.
• When rebooting a phone on this build and Build 14946 from last week, the device appears to get “stuck” on the blue Windows logo screen during the boot cycle. We have identified 2 bugs causing this issue and working to check in fixes soon. However, being “stuck” is only temporary. Depending on which device you have, your phone may be in this stuck state for 20-30 minutes, but it will eventually progress to the Lock screen. There is no permanent impact from these 2 bugs, just an unexpectedly long boot time. Please don’t reset your device! It’ll take longer to reset the device than it will to wait for the boot cycle to complete.
• Excel Mobile will freeze after adding sheets and eventually crashes.
• Insiders who have configured a data limit on their phone may get into a state where they receive frequent notifications about having exceeded this limit. To resolve the issue, please go into Settings > Device & Network > Data Usage and remove and recreate your data limit settings.
• UPDATE: We are investigating reports of devices getting stuck at 0% while downloading this build. For more information – head over to this forum post.

Known issues for PC

• Signing into apps such as Feedback Hub, Groove, MSN News, etc. with your Microsoft Account if you sign out or get signed out of these apps will not work. If this happens to you and you cannot sign in to Feedback Hub, you can send us feedback via the forums.
• You may experience a crash while using the protractor in Sketchpad – we’re working on a fix.
• If you have a 3rd party antivirus product installed on your PC – your PC might not be able to complete the update to this build and roll-back to the previous build.

Upcoming Bugbash

Just a heads-up that we are planning to kick off our next bugbash starting on Tuesday, November 8th and finishing at the end of the day on Sunday, November 13th. I’ll have more details in the coming weeks. Looking forward to seeing a lot of participation from Insiders!
Read more at Windows Blogs

What’s new in Build 14946

Customizing your precision touchpad experience (PC): Last week, we announced that we’d been working on refining your touchpad experience. This week, we’re taking that one step further. When you go into Settings > Devices > Touchpad, you will now find a section called “Other gestures”. In this section, you now have basic customization options for your three and four finger gestures. For taps, you can select between Cortana, Action Center, play/pause or middle mouse button, and for left/right swipes, you can select between switching apps or switching virtual desktops. Try it out and let us know what you think!

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/touchpad-1.png

However, we know that some of our Insiders prefer even more control over their experience, so for those Insiders (and power users) we have added a new Advanced Gestures Configuration page. The page can be accessed via a link at the bottom of Touchpad settings page.

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/touchpad-2-advanced.png

The Advanced Gestures Configuration page has more configuration options, including hooking gestures up for next/previous song, creating/deleting virtual desktops, or snapping windows. In addition to these new options, we’ve also updated the Touchpad settings to include reference diagrams to remind you of what to expect when you swipe with three or four fingers in a particular direction.

Known issues to look out for with your touchpad: since the last flight, we’ve fixed the issue resulting in touchpad scrolling being too sensitive in Windows 10 apps – appreciate everyone who shared their feedback on the subject. There’s one other known issue we’re looking into right now that click and drag with your precision touchpad might get misrecognized as right-click in this build. You’ll also notice that there’s a “custom keyboard shortcut” option in settings – that hasn’t lit up yet, but we’ll let you know when it does. Keep the feedback coming!

Separate screen time-out settings when using Continuum for Phone (Mobile): Today, we are happy to announce the availability of a top user request for Continuum for Phone. With this update, you will now be able to turn off whichever screen you are not using with Continuum – saving battery and preventing screen burn-in. If you are working on a Word document, your phone screen will sleep without any impact on your Continuum session. If you make a call, hang-up, or press the phone power button, you can keep right on working in Word with Continuum. And, if you prefer longer or shorter timeout values, you can change them independently for the phone and connected screen, using the settings found under Settings > Personalization > Lock screen. Have fun, and keep sending us great feedback on Continuum!

Updated Wi-Fi Settings page (PC and Mobile): We continue to make Settings more similar across Windows devices. We have added a new setting to the Wi-Fi settings page. When you go to Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi on your PC, then turn Wi-Fi off, you can now select a time under “Turn Wi-Fi back on” to have it turn on automatically after the amount of time you choose. It’s set to Manually by default in this build.

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/10/wi-fi-turn-back-on.png

We are also continuing to move functionality from the Wi-Fi (legacy) screen to the new Wi-Fi settings screen on Mobile. After you turn off Wi-Fi, choose a time under Turn Wi-Fi back on to have it turn on automatically after the amount of time you choose. Based on what we heard from customers in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we changed the default setting from “In 1 hour” to Manually in this build.

Option to prevent autocorrection (Mobile): On your phone, if you see that an autocorrection is going to happen (i.e. the first candidate is bolded) and it’s not what you intended, you will now see what you originally typed as the second candidate. Tapping on that candidate will prevent the autocorrection, and the system will learn your vocabulary and get smarter over time.

Option to remove a word from user dictionary (Mobile): We learn from your typing on the phone and build up a local user dictionary that adapts the keyboard prediction, autocorrection and shape writing experiences to your language style. Sometimes you may type a misspelled word and send it as is, sometimes you may tap on a red squiggled word and then tap the “+” sign by accident. Both save the unwanted word into your user dictionary, and it may appear when you type something similar in the future. Now you have a way to manually remove bad entries: tap on the word you don’t like in the text box, and you will see a candidate that is the word with a “-“ sign before it. Tapping on that candidate will remove the word completely from your user dictionary and no longer suggest it.

[ADDED] Expanding our to text prediction to more languages: This has been an exciting build for keyboard improvements, and we’re excited to announce one more – with this build, we’ve updated the following keyboards to now support text prediction: Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Slovene (also called Slovenian), Bulgarian, Albanian, Macedonian, Afrikaans, Galician, Basque, Swahili, Bangla in Bangladesh, Georgian, Azerbaijani (also called Azeri) (in Latin script), Kazakh, Armenian, Hausa (in Latin script) and Uzbek (in Latin script). If you speak any of these languages, we’d love for you to try it out and let us know how it feels (specific examples really help, if you have any). We’ll be watching the feedback closely and plan to update this work based on what we hear from you.

Important note about a change to automatic backups of your phone (Mobile): We have changed the frequency of scheduled backups for Mobile to once a week. Initiating a backup manually by clicking the “Back up now” button remains unchanged and works as expected. You can do this via Settings > Update & security > Backup and clicking the “More options” link at the bottom. As always, it’s good to do a backup of your device before updating to a new build.

 Other improvements and fixes for PC

• Optional components such as Hyper-V and Bash should remain installed after updating to this build.
• We have fixed the issue where signing into games that use Xbox Live would not work. You should be able to sign-in to Xbox Live in games in this build.
• We fixed the issue causing Microsoft Edge to sometimes crash on launch, or when you type in address bar or try to open a new tab. You no longer need to run the PowerShell script.
• We fixed the issue causing touch scrolling to be too sensitive in Windows 10 apps, such as Microsoft Edge.
• We fixed an issue where Explorer.exe would hang when attempting to open considerably large .MOV files.
• We fixed an issue that could result in the network icon occasionally getting into a state where a red X would display in the taskbar despite an active internet connection, until the device had been restarted.
• We fixed an issue where if the device’s brightness was automatically adjusted after being woken from sleep, the brightness level shown in the Action Center’s Brightness Quick Action might not reflect the current brightness of the device.
• We fixed an issue leading to Narrator not tracking focus on the Start Menu All apps list or tiles.
• We fixed an issue potentially resulting in the “Open with…” dialog displaying with two entries for Calculator after tapping the Calculator key on a keyboard or running the Calculator app.

Other improvements and fixes for Mobile

• We fixed the issue causing you to get into a state where text messages will fail to send.
• When your phone is connected to your PC, long lists of captured photos will now load significantly faster in File Explorer.
• We’ve updated Narrator’s reading order for Windows 10 apps which display an app bar on the bottom of the app, for example OneDrive, so now the contents of the page will be read before the contents of the app bar
• We fixed an issue resulting in video thumbnails sometimes not being shown in WhatsApp – videos received from this build onwards will display a thumbnail.
• We fixed an issue resulting in Camera app video recordings having a slight crackle to their audio in recent builds.

Known issues for PC

• If you have 3^rd party antivirus products such as Bitdefender, Kaspersky Antivirus, F-Secure Antivirus and Malwarebytes installed on your PC – your PC might not be able to complete the update to this build and roll-back to the previous build.
• Larger Windows Store games such as ReCore, Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3, Killer Instinct and Rise of the Tomb Raider may fail to launch.
• [ADDED] PCs that are capable of Connected Standby such as the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 may bugcheck (bluescreen) while in Connected Standby.

Known issues for Mobile

• If your phone has additional speech packs installed – this build will fail to install on your phone with an 0x80188319 error. This is why we polled Insiders about language pack usage this week. Based on the response, we decided to push forward and send the latest bits. This issue will be fixed in the next build we release. NOTE: Removing speech packs will not correct the issue. Your device will continue to try and download and install the update and fail. It is recommended you move to the Slow ring until this issue is fixed. UPDATE – this issue has been mitigated.

Getting misconfigured PCs up to date

Some Windows Insiders who have pre-release builds on their PCs are not targeted correctly for receiving updates because they have not opted into receiving Insider Preview builds by having selected a valid ring or are in some other misconfigured state. To re-target these PCs, we are making a server-side change that will put these PCs in the Slow ring so that they can receive updates. Specifically:

• Going forward, any build from our Development Branch installed on a PC will be put into the Slow ring. This includes if you installed a Development Branch build from an ISO or later reset the device.
• For PCs on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update that were previously opted in to receiving builds but see a “Fix me” button on the Windows Insider Program settings page because they no longer have a registered Microsoft account attached will be put in the Release Preview ring.

If you would like to adjust these settings or suspend getting Development branch build updates temporarily (7 days), you can do so by going to Settings > Update & security > Windows Insider Program. To move to the Fast ring, a Windows Insider registered Microsoft Account must be attached to the PC. For enterprises running Insider Preview builds, you can manage this via these Group Policies documented here.
Read more at Windows Blogs

New Extensions in Microsoft Edge

We’re working with partners on adding new extensions and want our Insiders to try them out first! We have another new release which we need your help testing and giving feedback on before we publish to the general public: Turn Off the Lights is a lightweight and useful add-in designed for a more comfortable video experience. We also need some more help testing our other preview extensions: Tampermonkey is a popular userscript manager that lets users customize the content of pages across the web. Microsoft Personal Shopping Assistant is your smart shopping cart across the web, which collects your browsed products and lets you get price alerts for saved products and compare products between sellers. You can install this at the links above and try them out on any Anniversary Update build – send feedback to the Feedback Hub or @MSEdgeDev on Twitter.

Authentication changes affecting connectivity to NAS devices and home file servers

After updating to the latest Insider Preview builds, you may have noticed that shared devices on your home network have disappeared from your home network folder. You may have also noticed your mapped network drives are not available. If you change your network to “private” or “enterprise”, it should start working again. For more information on this behavior change, see this Microsoft Security Bulletin.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Updates

WSL will install Ubuntu version 16.04 (Xenial) instead of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) in an upcoming release. This change will apply to Insiders installing new instances (lxrun.exe /install or first run of bash.exe). Existing instances with Trusty will not be upgraded automatically. Users can upgrade their Trusty image to Xenial using the do-release-upgrade command. Full WSL release notes can be found here.

Other improvements and fixes for PC

• We fixed the issue causing Narrator to continually speak the progress of a song e.g. update with the current time of the progress bar every second if you navigate to the progress bar while a song is playing in Groove Music.
• We fixed the issue where using the tab key to navigate the Settings app wouldn’t work.
• We fixed an issue resulting in Explorer.exe frequently crashing for some Insiders, particularly for those with multiple network switches.

Known issues for PC

• Optional components may not work after upgrading to this build. To get it working again, go to “Turn Windows features on or off”, scroll down and check the right optional component and click ok.  After a reboot, the optional component will be enabled again.
• Tencent apps and games will cause your PC to bugcheck (bluescreen).
• Running sfc /scannow in an elevated command prompt will fail at 20% with the error “could not perform the requested operation.”

Other improvements and fixes for Mobile

• We fixed the issue causing the pin pad to not be visible to unlock the phone even after rebooting the phone.
• We fixed the issue where some phones lose the ability to use their SIM cards.
• We fixed the mobile hotspot issue where it works the first time but subsequent attempts to use the feature won’t work until the phone is rebooted.
• We fixed an issue causing some devices such as the Lumia 650 from failing to install a new build with Error 0x80188308.
• We fixed the issue causing some build updates to fail with an 800703ed error code.
• We fixed the issue where Action Center no longer closes if you swipe up on the empty space (area of Action Center that doesn’t show any notifications).
• We fixed an issue where notifications were unexpectedly showing the app logo within the notification when viewed in Action Center.
• We fixed an issue for devices that shipped with Windows Phone 8.1, such as the Lumia 930 and 1520, where if you plugged in a headset during an ongoing call, the audio would not be routed to the headset.

Known issues for Mobile

• If you have your default storage set to a SD card for apps, installation of apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat will fail with an error. As a workaround, set your default location to your device’s onboard storage.

Another very important reminder about build expiration

We want to continue to remind Windows Insiders about the upcoming expiration of old Insider Preview builds. Since September 15th, PCs running really old Insider Preview builds started to see build expiration notifications once a day. Starting on October 1st, these PCs will start rebooting every 3 hours and then on October 15th – these PCs will stop booting all together. If your PC is running one of these old Insider Preview builds, please make sure you update to the latest build available via Settings > Update & security > Windows Update. Build 14926 and newer has an updated expiration date of May 1st, 2017. If your PC is running the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Build 14393) in the Slow and Release Preview rings today – this does not apply to you and you will not be notified of your build expiring.

image: https://winblogs.azureedge.net/win/2016/09/new-expiration.png

Read more at MS Windows Blog