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Windows 10 feature wishlist
The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is here at long last and while it brings upgrades to digital pen usage and Cortana with a slew of new tools, we still want more Microsoft! Call us greedy, but Windows 10 isn't perfect yet and we think there's still room to improve with even more features and UI tweaks.
So here's a quick wishlist of the future upgrades and updates that are just begging to come to Windows 10 and don't forget to hit the comments with your thoughts on what's still missing.
This article is part of TechRadar's Windows 10 week. Microsoft's latest operating system turns from a free to a paid upgrade on July 29, and we're looking to answer the question of whether it's good for you.
Streaming PC games to Xbox One
Right now you can stream your Xbox One games to a PC, but what we want to really do is the reverse. Microsoft is already investigating the idea, but it hasn't set a timeline of when the feature might possibly come out.
The biggest hurdle in the process is finding some way of translating games you can only play with a mouse and keyboard. However, Phil Spencer has also said such peripheral support is already in the works with Xbox One's developer kit. For now though, it seems mouse support isn't quite there yet and won't likely be there until months away.
Given that Razer, Valve and Nvidia have figured out technical part PC game streaming, we can't imagine this would be impossible with the Xbox One.
Windows 8.1's Start Screen
I know what you're thinking but hear me out before you call me crazy. There's actually still some design elements that were better on Windows 8.1 than Windows 10. The biggest one namely is the way Windows 8.1 rendered all your applications on Start Screen.
Live Tiles on Windows 10 are great and all, but if you want to scroll through every application you have loaded on your system, you're relegated to a small list on the side. Windows 8.1 on the other hand gave you a full-screen slate of apps with larger icons to tap on. It's great that Microsoft focused on improving the desktop experience of its OS, but it could still use a few touch-friendly tweaks.
Better display scaling please
High-resolution displays are quickly becoming the norm on Windows machines, but some applications still have yet to scale properly. For the most part, if you want to display your desktop at 4K that's no problem. Just set your scaling higher to increase the size of text, apps, and other items to 200% – which also happens to be the default scaling set on Microsoft's self-made Surface Book and Surface Pro 4.
The problem is everything outside of Microsoft's software portfolio doesn't follow the same model. Everyday applications from Photoshop to Hipchat have comically small and unusable interfaces at higher resolutions. It's high time that Microsoft made a plugin or worked directly with software developers to make display scaling universal across both first- and third-party applications.
Account management within Windows 10
Our use case with Windows 10 is a bit extreme, having to review a ton of laptop and desktop, but we're tired of having to go through Microsoft's websites to (de)authorize devices connected Office 365 and the Windows Store. We could easily see the same settings being slipped into the account options in settings and it would also be a fairly easy tweak.
Tabbed file browser
Tabs have around for over a decade since they hit the street in Opera and Firefox, but in 2016 we still don't see a single tab in the Windows 10 file explorer. Just like browser tabs, they would make opening more than one folder and switching back and forth between them so much easier.
Apple adopted a tabbed version of Finder back in 2014 with OS X Yosemite, but Microsoft hasn't even hinted at the thought of introducing the helpful feature. What gives Microsoft!?
