Another week, another Insider Preview build for Insiders in the Fast and Skip Ahead rings. Today's build brings yet more smaller tweaks, enhancements and improvements over the last build, including more changes to Settings, touch keyboard and more.
What's new in build 17040?
- Adjust the brightness of SDR content on your HDR display: Starting with Build 17040, Windows now lets you adjust how bright SDR content appears when running in HDR mode on the desktop. On an HDR capable system, you will see a slider in the "HDR and advanced color settings" page under Settings > System > Display.
- New Cursor, pointer, and touch feedback section in Ease of Access Settings: Continuing our recent efforts to reorganize this section in Settings, you'll notice that "change cursor thickness", "Change pointer size and color", and "Change touch feedback" have been moved to this new place.
- Shape-writing with wide touch keyboard: With the Fall Creators Update we introduced shape-writing input for one-handed keyboard. We've heard your feedback, and with today's build we're happy to announce that it's now also available when using the wide keyboard!
- Improved Insertion Gesture: Based on your feedback about gesture recognition, we've updated the insertion gesture (to add space between words or letters) to now be a small caret (see below gif for a demo of what it looks like, along with a cameo of our joining gesture).
- A New Commit Gesture: We've added a new gesture so you can automatically commit your text and clear out the text in the handwriting panel. This gesture looks like a 90 degree angle bracketing the end of your text – see gif below for an example of how it works.
- Improved button layout for Chinese (Simplified) Handwriting: If you use Chinese (Simplified), you'll now see a layout similar to the one announced for other languages with Build 17035. The buttons in the handwriting panel are collapsed by default – tap the button with the ellipsis to expand them.
Other changes and improvements:
- We've added settings that let you view and manage your activity history, which Cortana uses to let you pick up where you left off. Find these settings in Settings > Privacy > Activity history.
- We fixed an issue where network profiles might change from Private to Public after upgrading to the previous build.
- We fixed an issue resulting in checkboxes being missing from certain win32 apps.
- We fixed a typo in the Windows Defender Security Center's Controlled Folder Settings.
- We fixed an issue resulting not being able to fully remove Windows.old in the last two flights.
- We fixed an issue resulting in Narrator not saying anything when the candidate bar for hardware keyboard prediction opened. We also fixed an issue where Narrator wasn't reading the word candidate when the focus moved into candidate bar.
- We fixed an issue where the "Working on updates" screen was black with a small theme colored box instead of entirely theme colored.
- We fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders experiencing a green screen on the previous flight with the error BAD_POOL_CALLER.
- We fixed an issue resulting in UWP app sometimes leaving drop shadow leftovers after closing the window.
- We fixed an issue where inactive window scrolling wouldn't work if Excel 2016 was in focus.
- We fixed an issue resulting in a noticeable flicker when using hotkeys or a precision touchpad to switch between virtual desktops.
- We fixed an issue where the XAML Reveal light wouldn't follow your mouse until the first mouse click – instead showing the entire element lit. This issue was visible in Settings and other XAML based UI in the last few builds.
- We fixed an issue resulting in changes to Feedback Frequency in Feedback & Diagnostics Settings not persisting after leaving the page and returning.
- We fixed an issue where Start wouldn't open if you pressed the Windows key when the system menu from elevated Command Prompt or Task Manager window was open.
- We fixed a rare issue where if you had certain streaming-capable apps on your PC before upgrading you might end up seeing a black screen with only a cursor for some time after logging in.
- We fixed an issue from recent flights where the "Add" button in the PIN section of Sign-in Option Settings didn't work for local accounts.
- We've updated the icon for Collections in Cortana.
- We've updated the touch keyboard so that the margin between each key is visual only. This change will be noticeable if you accidentally overshoot the key press by just a tiny bit – before it might seem as if key presses were being dropped in this scenario.
- Based on your feedback, the feature to restore applications that have registered for application restart after you reboot or shutdown (through power options available on the Start Menu and various other locations) has been set to only occur for users that have enabled "Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting my device after an update or restart" in the Privacy section under Sign-in Options Settings.
As always, you can check out the official Windows Blog for the complete changelog, including a list of known issues!
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