Microsoft Build 2018: the biggest news from the conference – The Verge

Microsoft reveals the future of its Fluent Design for Windows 10

2018-05-09T07:00:02-04:00

Microsoft first unveiled its Fluent Design changes for Windows 10 at Build last year, adding subtle animations to many apps and core parts of Windows. We've seen a number of changes to the design of apps in the Fall Creators Update and the recent April 2018 Update, and now Microsoft is unveiling some future Fluent Design plans today at Build 2018.

During a session on Fluent Design at Build today, Microsoft unveiled a number of new subtle changes that will appear in Windows 10 apps this year. Microsoft is using shadow effects across Fluent Design, alongside modernizing context menus and implementing consistent back button controls in apps.

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Microsoft is changing how Alt-Tab works on Windows 10

2018-05-08T12:35:14-04:00

Microsoft's next major Windows 10 update, codenamed "Redstone 5," has been in testing for a few weeks now, and the company is now ready to unveil some new features that it's experimenting with. Alongside the new Sets feature for all Windows 10 apps, Microsoft is also changing the way the Alt-Tab feature works. Instead of tabbing between apps, Microsoft is experimenting with allowing Windows 10 users to also switch between the tabs within the Sets feature inside the Alt-Tab interface.

Microsoft hasn't overhauled its Alt-Tab task switcher for years, and this feels like a major addition. Essentially, it means Alt-Tab will now work for apps and …

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Windows 10 Sets will use tabs to bridge the gap between apps and websites

2018-05-08T11:56:52-04:00

Microsoft is officially bringing tabs to everything with a new feature called "Sets" in the next version of Windows 10 that was announced at the company's annual Build conference. Sets - which has been previously featured in early Windows 10 Insider preview builds - aims to use tabs to bridge the gap between apps and websites, letting you group projects together in a single window by specific tasks.

Sets isn't just adding tabbed windows to each individual app, like Apple added on many of its apps with macOS Sierra. It's a universal tab system that spans all the apps on your computer as well as the internet. While you could have a single win …

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Microsoft Build 2018: start time, live stream, and schedule

2018-05-08T09:15:55-04:00

Microsoft's annual build developer conference starts this week with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella, executive VP Scott Guthrie, and CTO of Microsoft Azure Mark Russinovich, among others. Unlike other big company developer conferences, Build's keynotes take place over two days. On its opening day, Nadella's keynote will focus on the company's cloud and AI offerings. Day two will be all about Windows. There's also, of course, two full days of programming sessions, some of which will likely show up online in the following days.

On day one, we got an exclusive look into the future of Microsoft with Satya Nadella, saw some design applications …

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Microsoft’s meeting room of the future is wild

2018-05-07T13:45:50-04:00

Microsoft just demonstrated a meeting room of the future at the company's Build developer conference. Meeting rooms, conference calls, and meetings in general are usually the stuff of nightmares, but Microsoft is working on prototype hardware that will make meetings a lot easier. Microsoft's meeting room demonstration is seriously impressive, and provides a glimpse of what's possible in the future.

It all starts with a 360-degree camera and microphone array that can detect anyone in a meeting room, greet them, and even transcribe exactly what they say in a meeting regardless of language. Microsoft has been working on translation features fo …

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Microsoft is moving Kinect to the cloud

2018-05-07T12:48:56-04:00

Microsoft is moving Kinect to the cloud, the company's CEO Satya Nadella announced today during the annual Build keynote. "Kinect, when we first launched it in 2010, was a speech-first, gaze-first, vision-first device. It was used in gaming, and then, later on, it came to the PC, and it was used in many applications: medical, industrial, robotics, education," said Nadella. "We've been inspired by what developers have done, and since Kinect, we've made a tremendous amount of progress when it comes to some of the foundational technologies in HoloLens. So we're taking those advances and packaging them up as Project Kinect for Azure."

It's big …

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Microsoft demonstrates Alexa and Cortana integration

2018-05-07T12:40:30-04:00

Microsoft first announced its Alexa and Cortana integration last year, and the company is providing an update today. Despite falling behind both Google Assistant and Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana will now include access to Amazon's digital assistant. At Microsoft's Build conference today, the software maker demonstrated Cortana running on Alexa and vice versa.

The integration works by simply summoning Cortana with the command "Alexa, open Cortana." You can then ask follow-up questions or commands like "send an email" to a particular person that you wouldn't normally be able to do with Alexa alone. Likewise, you can bring up Alexa within the Co …

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Microsoft partners with DJI on a new Windows 10 drone SDK

2018-05-07T12:01:05-04:00

DJI is partnering with Microsoft to build a new drone SDK for Windows 10 that will enable full flight control and data transfer to Windows 10 PCs, which allows it to directly connect DJI's drones with Windows computers.

Along with controlling the drones, the SDK will also make it possible to easily integrate third-party hardware like multispectral sensors or custom actuators with DJI's drones, expanding what customers will be able to do with their drones.

Additionally, going forward, the two companies will be working together to use Microsoft Azure as DJI's preferred cloud provider for commercial solutions, which will also involve utilizin …

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Microsoft Layout lets HoloLens users design a floor plan with holographic furniture

2018-05-07T11:59:44-04:00

Microsoft is expanding its list of "mixed reality" tools with a program called Microsoft Layout, which lets people design and visualize real spaces in either Microsoft HoloLens or a virtual reality headset. Layout allows Windows Mixed Reality users to define a virtual floor plan and then move 3D models around on it in a VR headset, previewing how a room would look and feel. Then, they can go to a physical location and view that layout using HoloLens - either alone or with other designers - to see how these new objects would fit alongside existing ones.

There are lots of existing design tools that do similar things to Layout, including augme …

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