ui design

When Microsoft rewrote Windows’s shell for Windows 11, it didn’t just shift icons to the center — it deliberately traded decades of user-facing flexibility for a tightly curated, symmetrical experience, and that trade-off explains why the taskbar in Windows 11 behaves so differently from the...

Nearly five years after Windows 11 shipped with a redesigned—and deliberately less customizable—taskbar, Microsoft appears to be reversing course: multiple industry reports say Windows 11 will soon let users move the taskbar off the bottom of the screen and adjust its size, restoring long-missed...

GovCIO’s Kearneysville hiring blitz for a Journeyman Windows System Administrator puts a familiar, high‑stakes mix of legacy Windows operations, enterprise virtualization, and DoD‑grade security squarely in the spotlight — a hybrid role that demands hands‑on Windows Server and VMware experience...

Microsoft’s PowerToys team is quietly prototyping a persistent, configurable “Command Palette Dock” for Windows 11 — an opt‑in, extension‑driven strip you can pin to any screen edge to surface live telemetry, media controls, clipboard snippets, and pinned Command Palette extensions without ever...

Microsoft’s PowerToys team is quietly prototyping a macOS‑style, positionable menu bar for Windows 11 — the “Command Palette Dock” — that would let you pin live widgets, app shortcuts and Command Palette extensions to a persistent, highly configurable strip anchored to any screen edge...

Microsoft’s PowerToys team is quietly experimenting with a new, optional UI surface called the Command Palette Dock — a persistent, positionable bar that brings a macOS‑style top menu / Linux‑style panel to Windows 11 as an opt‑in PowerToys feature, and the prototype is now open for developer...

Microsoft’s PowerToys team is quietly prototyping a persistent, Linux‑style menu bar for Windows 11 — a configurable “dock” attached to the new PowerToys Command Palette that can live along any screen edge and host glanceable system info, media controls, and pinned Command Palette extensions...

Windows 11 Insiders are quietly seeing a set of subtle but telling UI and AI-related changes in recent Dev and Beta builds (.767x) — from a hidden taskbar toggle that hints at deeper assistant access to modernized VHD dialogs and a refreshed Protected Print Mode UI — and these updates are...

The redesigned Start menu that suddenly fills laptops and smaller screens is not an accident — it’s a deliberate, system-level reimagining of Windows 11’s launcher that Microsoft has been gating and shipping through servicing updates since late 2025, and which began reaching many mainstream...

Microsoft’s Edge browser is quietly wearing Copilot’s clothes: test builds in the Canary and Dev channels show a Copilot‑inspired visual overhaul that applies the assistant’s color palette, fonts and softer geometry to Edge’s settings, context menus and new‑tab surfaces — and that visual...

PowerToys’ Color Picker is a deceptively simple utility that solves a persistent pain point for designers, developers, and anyone who needs precise color values: pick any pixel on the screen, get a clean color code in the format you need, and move on—fast. Background Since its modern revival as...

Microsoft has finally given File Explorer the dark treatment many Windows users have begged for, but the long-awaited cosmetic fix arrives as both a delightful quality‑of‑life upgrade and a cautionary lesson in platform-wide rollouts. In Insider Preview Build 17666 Microsoft officially added a...

Windows 11 marks a clear evolution of Microsoft’s desktop vision: a cleaner, more consistent user interface, tighter device integration, and a set of productivity-first features built around modern hardware and security expectations that together aim to deliver the “ultimate PC experience.”...

Microsoft is closing 2025 with a sizeable Windows 11 update: a preview build released December 1 has already started surfacing a slate of UI polish, Copilot integrations, virtualization controls, gaming improvements and hardware-gated AI features — and Microsoft plans to roll the final Patch...

Forty years after the first boxed copies of Microsoft Windows left the factory, one of the operating system’s most recognizable and consequential interface elements — the Start menu — has completed a long, uneven arc from a simple program launcher to a device-aware, scrollable canvas that now...

Forty years ago a boxed copy of Microsoft Windows left a factory and quietly rewired how people work, play, and think about personal computers — a journey that runs from the tiled, mouse-driven experiments of Windows 1.0 to the AI‑steeped Windows 11 and Copilot era of today. Background /...

Microsoft’s newest Copilot ad — a short influencer clip meant to showcase the convenience of Copilot on Windows 11 — instead became a high-profile demonstration of what happens when an AI assistant misreads context, points to the wrong control, and recommends an action that’s already been taken...

A slick fan-made mockup called “Windows 26” has reignited a familiar debate: should Microsoft chase a glittering, agentic future powered by on-device AI, or return to the fundamentals Windows users keep asking for — speed, consistency, and less bloat? The short answer: both visions coexist in...

As the year closes, an arresting fan-made concept called Windows 26 — envisioned by designer Abdi (known online as AR 4789) — has reignited conversations about what Microsoft’s next generation of Windows could and should be: a visually consistent, productivity-first OS that blends floating...

Microsoft’s refreshed Start menu in the Windows 11 November 2025 wave is a deliberate redesign — not just a cosmetic tweak — that returns a scrollable, single-surface launcher to the heart of the OS while adding new views, smarter discovery, phone continuity, and clearer personalization...