14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is yet to detail all of its Windows 10 plans, but it's believed that the company would introduce the very first update for the core operating system in the fall of 2015, followed by one major update in 2016.
Codenamed Redstone, this major update would be shipped in two waves, one in the summer and another one in the fall, both coming with new features and improvements.
Work on Redstone has already started at Microsoft, but the company has remained completely tight-lipped on this new update until now. And yet, in a private presentation with few journalists at BUILD 2015, designer Jeff Fong has revealed screenshots of a few Windows prototypes, thus providing us with an early glimpse into the future of Windows 10.
Published by ComputerBild, who claims that these could show the upcoming Redstone update, these screenshots show a dramatic change in terms of looks, with pretty much every single feature on the desktop to get significantly overhauled.
New Start menu and taskbar
These early photos show a completely new Start menu that's based on the existing design of Windows 10, but goes further with tiles that can expand to the entire width of the menu. There's no space between live tiles and they are all completely flat.
More features and settings can be accessed through a sidebar using a hamburger menu, while the top of the Start menu groups icons for desktop apps.
The taskbar is completely different from what we have right now and comes with all icons placed in the center and not in the left side as they're currently displayed in Windows 10.
This is basically the biggest change since the introduction of the taskbar in Windows 95, and it seems to follow the same design approach as Mac OS X. What's more, the source says that the taskbar can become completely invisible, with only these icons to be displayed in the center of the screen, thus more or less becoming a floating dock.
The interactive live tiles could finally become available in Windows Redstone (if the upcoming update is based on this concept), but with more features than you'd expect. Users would be able to control music playback and even like Facebook posts without even launching the app themselves.
A new concept called tile-in-tile also change the way tiles are displayed in the Start menu or Start screen. Folders grouping tiles from the same app or category, such as Office, will be smaller and displayed together with a description at the bottom, but you'll be able to launch each app by simply tapping it and without opening the folder first.
Overall, if these prototypes are indeed used for the development of the next update, Windows Redstone can represent for the core Windows platform a more significant overhaul than Windows 10, and the number of changes is absolutely impressive.
But keep in mind that all these screenshots show only early prototypes of Windows 10, so a lot could change until Redstone hits the market.
The story was updated to state that these screenshots were presented by Microsoft at BUILD 2015 and they reveal early prototypes of Windows 10.
Thank you for the tip, Winlux!
