Fall update will bring Continuity- & Universal Clipboard-like features to Microsoft's Windows 10
Roger Fingas
At its ongoing Build conference on Thursday, Microsoft revealed early details of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, which will notably incorporate new features linking up with Apple's iPhones and iPads.
Pick Up Where You Left Off — connected to Cortana and the update's Timeline feature — will let users resume app sessions across multiple devices, including not just Windows hardware but iOS and Android, Microsoft said. The technology is similar to Continuity/Handoff for macOS and iOS, which for instance lets someone writing with Pages on a Mac keep going on an iPad.
Microsoft is also working on a cloud-based clipboard that will let people quickly copy and paste between Windows, iOS, and Android apps. The idea appears identical to Apple's Universal Clipboard, though that option is limited to Apple devices, whereas Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard will enable pasting in virtually any mobile app if it's enabled.
Some other features of the update will include OneDrive Files On-Demand — letting people grab individual files without syncing or downloading whole folders — and Fluent Design, an aesthetic coming to all Microsoft software.
The Fall Creators Update will likely go live in September.
Today Microsoft also revealed that by the end of the year, iTunes will be available on the Windows Store. iTunes has been on Windows for well over a decade, but has been absent from the Windows Store since the latter debuted with Windows 8 in 2012.
Showing up in Microsoft's store should not only increase Apple's exposure but ensure the relevance of iTunes to users of Windows 10 S, a stripped-down OS limited to Windows Store titles.
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
Marko Zivkovic
David Schloss
Wesley Hilliard
Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen
13 Comments
It would be nice if iCloud for Windows allowed universal copy&paste to extend to your Windows computers.
This is the company that dominated the industry for decades. Now they even proudly say they have 500 million Windows 10 users (a huge chunk of it being kiosks, corporate users and forced upgrades or PC bundles in my opinion), which is not even half of iOS users in comparison, so that's where MS ended up in 2017. I also think Satya Nadella has done more damage to the company in 3 years than Steve Ballmer did in all of his 14 years. Many people believed in some of his visions when he took over in 2014 but with every passing year it is clearer that he's not the visionary they were hoping for and instead the company is simply becoming more and more irrelevant.