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The Windows 10 Notepad app is about to get a major boost
One of the most-loved apps on Windows 10 is set for a significant upgrade in the next major update to the software.
Notepad, the word processor app bundled with Windows, will soon become a separate Store-updateable application, with its own section and page on the Microsoft Store.
This means that Notepad users will now be able to receive new features and upgrades automatically via the Microsoft Store as soon as they are available, rather than needing to wait for new additions to be bundled with a wider Windows 10 OS update.
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Notepad upgrade
Some reports have also claimed that Notepad has been moved out of its traditional place in the Windows Accessories folder, moving over to have its own place in the Start menu, showing that the app is getting a lot more attention from Microsoft all of a sudden.
Notepad has come automatically installed in Windows since version 1.0 of the operating system was released back in 1985, with sister program WordPad was automatically installed beginning in 1995 as part of the Windows 95 operating system.
The update comes as part of the newly-announced Windows 10 21H2 “Sun Valley Update” test build, which Microsoft is rolling out to testers in its Dev Channel now. Version Build 21337 or newer of this release will see Notepad updates automatically pushed via the Microsoft Store.
Sun Valley is set to bring a number of upgrades and changes to Windows 10, including a whole new look for many of the platform's most popular apps and services.
Reports earlier this year claimed this includes pop-up alert boxes being changed by adding rounded corners – which is becoming something of a theme for the desktop OS. Microsoft is also apparently looking at updating the background colors to common colors, and to make it so that when the box isn’t being actively highlighted by the cursor, the close button border is removed.
This move to rounded corners looks to be coming to a number of Windows 10’s core apps, the Settings panel, and other major elements of the desktop UI including the Start menu and Action Center.
Sun Valley is expected to get a wider launch in Microsoft's second feature update of 2021 (the 21H2 update).
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Via Windows Latest
Date
22 Mar 2021Sources
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Windows 11 finally gets faster right-click menus
Read MoreWindows 11 has hampered some users with a slow-performing right-click context menu for a good while now, something Microsoft has previously admitted – but the speed of the menu has been improved with the most recent preview of the OS.
Build 22572 was released last week with a bunch of improvements and fixes, including work to resolve the bug with the sluggish right-click context menu which appears when you click the right mouse button in File Explorer (meaning anywhere on a file or folder on the Windows 11 desktop, where this menu offers quick access to some core options).
As Windows Latest flagged up, Microsoft software engineer Jen Gentleman clarified on Reddit that right-click performance had been juiced up. In a response to a Windows 11 tester who noticed that the context menu felt faster with the latest preview build, Gentleman noted: “We did some work with 22572 to improve the context menu performance, so glad to hear it feels faster now.”
Elsewhere another eagle-eyed Redditor pointed out that the release notes for build 22572 state that Microsoft “made some more improvements to help with context menu invocation performance.”
Previously, some Windows 11 users had complained of delays of as much as one or two whole seconds when right-clicking before the context menu actually appears – which is bound to make the OS feel horribly unresponsive.
Now this sluggishness appears to have been largely remedied going by Microsoft’s official announcements, plus multiple reports on that Reddit thread.
Analysis: Better late than never – but test builds are shaping up promisingly
As ever, it’s good to see Microsoft fix a problem in Windows 11, particularly one as aggravating as this must be for affected users. Still, we can’t help but feel that it should have been tackled more quickly, seeing as this problem has been around since the launch of Windows 11 (more or less; or at least the first complaints emerged not long after the OS came out).
The fix seems to work for the majority of admittedly anecdotal observations that we’ve seen, and there is evidence of an optimistic outlook for the improvement of Windows 11 performance overall going forward. Another Redditor on the above highlighted thread commented that “overall the dev channel builds are a lot faster than the 22000 builds” and that “22H2 will be amazing”, so let’s keep our fingers crossed on that score.
Windows 11 22H2 is due in the second half of 2022, naturally, and it’s expected to further work on the design and appearance of the OS, with various important interface tweaks – like bringing back drag and drop functionality to the taskbar – as well as introducing that much-awaited support for Android apps on the desktop (that’s currently available in limited fashion for public preview, meaning testing).
- Check out our guide to Windows 11 problems and how to fix them
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