Microsoft is bringing new contact gestures, Start menu folders, a redesigned Task Manager, and plenty extra enhancements to Windows 11. A brand new construct of Windows 11 is available to testers today, and it’s full of recent options that appear to be they may considerably enhance the usability of Windows 11 general.

The new Start menu folders will enable Windows 11 customers to customise the pinned part of the Start menu into folders. You drag an app on prime of one other to create a folder, and you’ll rearrange apps inside folders and take away them. The skill to rename folders is coming in future check builds, however it’s good to see extra customization on the Start menu, given Windows 11 launched with out some ways to tweak the menu design.

Image: Microsoft

If you’ve at all times been a fan of the gestures in Windows 8, Microsoft is bringing 5 new contact gestures to Windows 11 quickly that may make utilizing tablets somewhat simpler. The first is the flexibility to swipe up on the taskbar to deliver up the Start menu and swipe right down to dismiss it once more. You’ll additionally have the ability to swipe between pinned, all apps, and really useful / extra on the Start menu.

The third new contact gesture permits you to swipe from the underside proper of the taskbar to point out the Quick Settings menu — helpful if you could toggle airplane mode shortly or entry Bluetooth settings. The animations for mentioning the Notification Center have additionally been improved, and there’s a brand new full-screen gripper in touch-oriented apps that may cease you by chance swiping from the perimeters of a pill display. Microsoft additionally says rotating your system between portrait and panorama orientation is getting “snapper” and “more responsive.”

Microsoft’s new Snap Layouts characteristic in Windows 11 can also be getting improved, permitting you to tug an app to the highest of a window and reveal all of the layouts you should utilize. Microsoft can also be enhancing its Focus characteristic to incorporate a Do Not Disturb mode. It makes it so much simpler to shortly silence notifications, so that you solely see precedence ones or ones for alarms.

Live Captions will quickly be constructed into Windows 11, accessible from a Winkey + CTRL + L shortcut. Live Captions will vastly profit people who find themselves deaf or onerous of listening to, however they’re additionally out there for anybody to make use of and will likely be mechanically generated on-device from any content material that features audio. Captions can float in a window or be displayed on the prime or backside of a display. This appears to be like like an important accessibility enchancment to Windows 11.

Image: Microsoft

Other enhancements on the best way embody the flexibility to tug and drop on the Windows 11 taskbar. This was a giant lacking a part of the preliminary launch, so Windows 11 customers will likely be glad to see this return. Microsoft can also be making it simpler to see your OneDrive storage inside File Explorer and enhancing the Quick Access characteristic to allow you to pin recordsdata in addition to folders.

In a push to cut back power consumption on PCs, Microsoft can also be altering the default values for sleep and display off within the energy settings in Windows 11. You’ll solely see these new settings in the event you clear set up Windows 11, however new PCs sooner or later will presumably ship with extra aggressive sleep / display off choices.

Image: Microsoft

Last however not least, the Task Manager redesign in Windows 11 is now official. It features a new command bar and a darkish theme, alongside an effectivity mode that allows you to restrict apps from consuming system sources.

As at all times, these new Windows 11 options are solely in testing proper now, which suggests a few of them will possible present up in month-to-month updates all through 2022. Microsoft simply delivered Windows 11’s first huge replace, and the corporate revealed it received’t wait to deliver new options simply yearly.