I still haven’t upgraded my Studio 2.
I really hope this sees the official light of day.
Microsoft is testing its tablet-friendly taskbar again in Windows 11 - The Verge
2 Likes
Would be nice, but if I recall @jhoff80’s comment correctly. There still won’t be a way to quickly change brightness or volume when watching full-screen video, because this bar disappears in that scenario, and (not 100% sure about this one) it doesn’t appear when swiping up from the bottom edge.
In the dev channel beta if you do a brief touch and hold you get both volume and screen brightness sliders when using MS video player apps, though it doesn’t seem to work at the moment with the netflix or Hulu apps, but it appears to be functionality that could be enabled with an app update
2 Likes
BTW one thing that seems to be going backward is when you try to resize a window as the area that you would touch or even click with a mouse seems to be getting ever smaller.
It’s possible that what I’m seeing is the partially the consequence of higher resolution/DPI screens and the UI /or perhaps device drivers just haven’t caught up yet.
Thanks, better than nothing, but WTH would they remove an implemention that matched iOS and Android, and instead introduce something that users will have to learn all over again and that is not OS-wide. 
4 Likes
And that is the problem in a nutshell.
As Fall Creators Update and MS using Android for the Surface Duo, they are no squarely in the camp of “lowest common denominator is good for consistency” — I want a stylus to function as a stylus, to be able to select text, and naturally interact w/ elements — scrolling is easily done via touch, I don’t need to cripple my stylus to be an 11th input for touch.
I’d give my interest in Hell for Wacom to select a set of chips/hardware for their Wacom Mobile Studio Pro which was easily Hackintoshed — I really wish negotiating for a license for Mac OS was an option.
Makes me wonder how well it would run Linux.
That’s the one advantage that Apple has with 3rd party devs versus Microsoft.
Apple can decree “thou shalt…” Whereas MS often seems to be in the position of "pretty please, if I ask really nicely?..
3 Likes
Their problem is one of inconsistency and hypocrisy. They dump new initiatives too quickly and even the ones that stick around don’t get serious attention from MS app development. There’s no mystery why third party developers and OEMs don’t toe a line with MS. They’ve been burned way too often. 
Apple is slow to adopt things but once they do they tend to go all in.
1 Like
Totally agreed. I half expect them to pull out of Windows Mixed Reality. It’s been very quiet on that front.
I don’t have access to the tablet-optimized taskbar on the new build yet, and I have to dig up the vivetool setting to force it, but if I remember correctly they did eventually update that and possibly fix it.
1 Like
My guess would be that one will continue to stick around, just because they have that DoD contract for custom versions of Hololens 2 that means they’ll be putting in the effort anyway.
Also, I’ve enabled the feature and now tested Media Player, Prime Video, and Emby, all three worked with the bottom right corner swipe up to see brightness and volume. A little glitchy still in it going away consistently and staying in fullscreen video afterwards every time, but it’s still a preview, the popup of the menu has been working every time.
More importantly for my specific use, I’m very happy to see Microsoft has fixed my biggest complaint with this feature (and it was similarly broken in Windows 8.1 actually):
If I now plug in to my docking station on my desk and close the Surface cover so that that screen is off and only the external display is being used, it now correctly stays in the normal taskbar. It doesn’t seem to be detecting an external keyboard/mouse but instead just basing the decision on an external display. It’s actually fairly clever about it now. If I’m duplicating my screen on the Surface and monitor, it goes to tablet mode. If I’m extending the screen or have only the monitor in use, it stays in normal mode.
Now if they’d only fix my last major tablet problem and let me swipe in from the left for task view instead of awful widgets. 
3 Likes
100% yes to this!
4 Likes
I’m gonna lay these problems on Windows 11, though it is almost certainly also a problem on AMD and Lenovo’s part (edit: and Realtek). My new Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X has two annoying issues out of the box: 1) Bluetooth going into power saving mode and never coming back and 2) the laptop going to sleep and never waking up properly (screen dark).
The first one is “solved” by going into the Device Manager under Bluetooth, Realtek driver and turning off the power saving feature. The second one seems to be that old, old Windows issue with hibernation. “Solved” (I think 
) by going into the admin console with powercfg.exe /hibernate off. We’ll see if that takes care of it in the long run.
As said, it’s not all on Windows; AMD & Lenovo (edit: and Realtek) all share blame for not yet getting the kinks out of Windows 11 plus AMD’s new 6000 series chips and the firmware and whatever else is involved (hopefully not hardware).
3 Likes
@Dellaster the Bluetooth sleeping and not coming back is a known issue with Realtek’s latest Bluetooth chips and later Windows 11 builds. From what my engineer has seen in emails, apparently MS and Realtech are currently arguing over who is at fault. With MS saying that Realtek is not properly acknowledging wake commands and Realtek saying that Ms made a change to the core service
5 Likes
, I had this issue with one of my previous W10 laptops, I believe toggling off ‘fast boot/startup’ in the menu where you can also set behaviour for closing the lid helped.
ps: MS needs to pull their heads out of their asses (pardon my french) and fix the gestures, quite stupid there is no gesture for the action center (/brightness / volume etc.).
2 Likes
So is it just me and my engineers, or have any you experienced what I’d call the “will it or won’t it show up and function” nature of third-party devices connected to your system?
Admittedly we are an extreme/edge case as we likely connect and disconnect many more different devices due to the nature of the job, but it seems to have gotten significantly worse after the latest cumulative update.
In the last two days, it seems to have completely forgotten that I ever connect either my monitor at home or here in the office, and also whether I’ll get both my keyboard and mouse on my Logitech unifying receiver or just one, with no way to know which. 
Device enumeration has always been a pain point with Windows, but this is going beyond. And it’s not just me as one of my other engineers is seeing similar with his USB sticks, and another won’t at the moment recognize that he has an external display connected. 
Argh!!!
1 Like
I haven’t updated to 22H2 yet, so devices have been rock solid this go round. Time to freeze updates for a while…
I once used the early Dell version with an XLS and iPhone (X maybe?) and it did have a lot going for it - now that Intel and Microsoft want to bring this to the processor and core level functions, maybe we’ll finally get at least a little taste of integration…
Sad thing is, it looks to be 12th gen and forward only…
2 Likes