After two weeks of waiting a new Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22557 finally released to Dev Channel on Thursday (Feb 17th, 2022). This Build came with numerous new features also improvements, kind of a biggest of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build so far this year to Dev Channel.
Something there worth a mention:
- The name of the branch has been changed to “NI_RELEASE”. And the branch to Dev Channel is irrelevant to the features and improvements included within them.
- This build will not be offered to ARM64 PCs.
- This build includes a lot of general improvements and refinements to Windows 11.
Create and curate folders in the pinned apps area of Start menu
In this Build 22557, you can customize your pins in Start by organizing them into folders. Simply drag an app on top of another to create a folder. You can add more apps to a folder, re-arrange apps within a folder, and remove apps from a folder. Further improvements like the ability to name and re-name folders upcoming.
Introducing Do Not Disturb and Focus
A new Do Not Disturb and Focus feature being added to this build to help stay on track, focus integrates with the Clock app for another focus tools, such as focus timer and calming music.
Do Not Disturb:
It’s easier than ever to silence notification banners with Do Not Disturb. When you are ready to see the notifications that you may have missed, you can find them in Notification Center.
You are always in control of your notifications. Under Settings > System > Notification, you can setup rules to automatically turn on Do not disturb. For example, you could set Do not disturb to automatically turn on outside of your work hours. Additionally, you can set priority notifications to control whether calls, reminders, and specific apps break through when Do not disturb is on.
Focus:
It is easy to start focus from Notification Center (click on the time and date in the taskbar):
- Open Notification Center.
- Select the amount of time for your focus session.
- Press Start Focus.
When you start a focus session, taskbar badging will turn off, flashing of applications in the taskbar will turn off, a focus timer will appear on screen, and do not disturb will turn on. Focus in Windows integrates with focus sessions in the Clock app, so you can play calming music and see a task list from Microsoft To-Do. When your focus session ends, you will receive a notification letting you know your focus time has completed. You can personalize your focus experience from Settings > System Focus.
Live Captions
The Captions are automatically generated on-device from any content with audio when turned on. Captions can be displayed at the top or bottom of the screen, or in a floating window. The caption window can be resized, and caption appearance can be personalized by applying or customizing a caption style. Microphone audio can be included, which can be helpful during in-person conversations. Live captions support English (U.S.) content.
To get started, live captions can be turned on with the Windows logo key + Ctrl + L shortcut, or from the Accessibility flyout under Quick Settings. When turned on the first time, live captions will prompt for download of the required speech model to enable on-device captioning.
Improving Quick Access in File Explorer
Rolling out an update to File Explorer’s Quick Access view. “Pin to Quick Access” support has been extended from only supporting Folders to now also supporting Files. Pinned files are shown in a new section above Recent files in Quick Access.
For users who log into Windows with (or attach as a secondary account) a Microsoft Account or Work/Education account, Pinned and Recent files from Office.com will also be shown in Quick Access. Changes that pin or unpin files hosted in OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams will sync and be reflected in Office.com and Office apps. File activity updates from collaborators such as edits, and comments are shown in Tiles view and can also be shown in Details view.
See your OneDrive storage in File Explorer
To help you have control over storage consumption and ensure your files are syncing, added OneDrive integration into File Explorer. When browsing your OneDrive folders, you can now see your sync status and quota usage without having to leave File Explorer.
New Touch Gestures
This build includes 5 new touch gestures to make it easier and quicker to navigate Windows 11 on a PC with touch screen.
Swipe to invoke and dismiss Start: Swipe with your finger from the middle of the taskbar to invoke the Start menu and swipe back down to dismiss it.
Swipe between Pinned/All apps and Recommended /More on Start: Within Start, swipe right to left from Pinned to get to All apps and left to right to get back to Pinned. The same gesture works for Recommended/More.
Swipe to invoke and dismiss Quick Settings: Swipe with your finger from the bottom right of the taskbar to invoke Quick Settings and swipe back down to dismiss it.
Swipe to invoke and dismiss Notification Center: Updated with animation when swiping to invoke and dismiss Notification Center from the right edge of your screen so that it’s more responsive and follows your finger.
Full screen gripper: In full screen touch-oriented apps and games (e.g., Solitaire), notice a gripper that appears if you swipe from the edges of the screen. This feature is designed to keep you in your app if you accidentally swipe near the edges. If you need to access edge content, simply swipe again on the gripper.
Improving Snap Layouts
Added a new away to snap windows into snap layouts that works wonderfully with both touch and mouse. Just drag a window to the top of the screen to reveal the snap layouts, drop the window on top of a zone to snap it, and use snap assist to finish building your layout. I must that this is a wonderful improvement to Snap layout, it very handy to process multiple programs within the same screen. On top of all that, they’re also improved snap assist to seamlessly animate between zones in a layout for a delightful end-to-end snapping experience.
More sustainable power settings and recommendations
The default values for Sleep and Screen off have been updated to reduce energy consumption, and carbon emissions, when PCs are idle. also provide power saving recommendations to help reduce carbon emissions to those with Sleep and Screen off set to Never.
Note: the changes to default Sleep and Screen off settings will only be seen by those clean installation of Windows 11 with this build or higher. If you intentionally set Sleep or Screen off to Never, please providing feedback to MS via Feedback Hub, especially if sleep is not working as expected.
More improvements to browsing the web in Microsoft Edge with Narrator
Building off the collection of improvements for Narrator and Microsoft Edge from Build 22509, they have been working on more improvements to web browsing with Microsoft Edge and Narrator. Specifically, when navigating the web more useful information is provided, navigating dialogs is more natural, and editing text should now be more reliable.
When navigating the web, you can have Narrator read the current item (e.g., current page, current time etc.) and when you need to sort a table on the web, Narrator will announce the sort order you’ve selected (e.g., ascending, descending).
They also made it simpler to know when an item is selected in a tree view control and to know the state of a checkbox when these are part of a list. We also improved link navigation, and you will find that tabbing through links on a webpage and pressing Enter will always take you to the link destination.
When you encounter a dialog box on the web, Narrator will help you stay focused within the dialog box and prevent navigation to the content that’s behind it. This improvement is currently available in Microsoft Edge Canary builds.
Lastly Narrator has a few improvements for when you are editing text on the web. First, if you are deleting text on a form field, Narrator will read the character that was deleted and if you need to cut a large set of text with Control + X, Narrator will confirm that the text has been cut.
Task Manager Re-design & Efficiency Mode
Microsoft finally updated the design of Task Manager to match the new Windows 11 design principles. This includes a new hamburger style navigation bar and a new settings page. A new command bar on each page gives access to common actions. Also brings dark theme to Task Manager and will automatically match the system-wide theme configured in the Settings app. This is version of Task Manager I’ve been waiting for a long time ago.
On last year Microsoft experimented with a new feature called “Echo mode” in Task Manager and bringing this back with a new brand name: “Efficiency mode”. This feature is helpful when you notice an app consuming high resources and would like to limit its consumption so that the system gives priority to other apps which will lead to faster foreground responsiveness and better energy efficiency.
You can apply Efficiency mode either by clicking on the command bar in the Processes page or right click on the process. You can only apply Efficiency mode to single process and not to the entire group process. If the option is grey out, it generally means that it’s a core Windows process and throttling it might affect the performance of the system. The Efficiency mode process will be marked with a new leaf icon, and we are also introducing new pause icon for Suspended process to indicate the process is in suspended mode (This feature isn’t available to all Insiders yet.)
Introducing a new PowerShell module to provision language and language related features
This new PowerShell Module allows users to easily add languages and related language features and manage settings like System Preferred UI Language, System Locale, Input method (Keyboard), Locale, Speech Recognizer, User Preferred Language List using the PowerShell prompt. These commands work in conjunction with the existing International PowerShell Module to provide the user control over various elements of the UI language on a PC. Note: To run the Install and Set commands you must run PowerShell as an administrator.
| To do this | Command |
| Install a language on the PC. | Install-Language Note: Please restart or log out and log back in for changes to take effect. Once you log back in, please change your Windows display language (WDL) via Settings > Time & language > Language & region to change the UI language on the PC. You can also change your WDL by using the international module commands (Set-WinUILanguageOverride ). Params: Language: The bcp47 tag of the language being installed. CopyToSettings (optional): If included, set the system and default device settings (WDL, regional, locale format) to the provided language following the installation. |
| Get a list of the installed languages on the device, which type of Language Pack is installed, and what Language Features are installed. | Get-InstalledLanguage Alias: Get-Language Params: Language (optional): filters the list to only show the given language. |
| Set a language as the System Preferred UI Language | Set-SystemPreferredUILanguage Alias: Set-PreferredLanguage, Set-SystemLanguage Params: Language: The bcp47 tag of the language being installed |
| Get the value of the current System Preferred Language. | Get-SystemPreferredUILanguage Note: Please restart or log out and log back to see the changes reflected in the new language. Additional user accounts created on the same system will reflect the new system language. Alias: Get-PreferredLanguage , Get-SystemLanguage |
| Uninstall a language on the PC. | Uninstall-Language Params: Language: The bcp47 tag of the language being installed. |
Due to the limitation of page, for more details of other changes and improvements you may visit https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2022/02/16/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-22557/
