14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 10 Redstone 3 (officially called Windows 10 Fall Creators Update) will bring a long list of improvements on PCs, many of which have already been announced by Microsoft itself, but there are obviously more subtle changes coming to users and we’re discovering them as we get closer to the public launch.
One of them is multi-step interactive notifications, which represent an update to the existing interactive notifications that are already available in Windows 10 and which should allow users to control more of their apps without actually launching them.
Multi-step interactive notifications do exactly what their name suggests: they allow you to perform a certain task straight from the notification, and depending on the option that you choose, you are then provided with another notification to perform another operation.
For example, if you receive an email, the interactive notification that you receive could include several options, including a “reply” option. If you click or tap this option, another notification could show up with a quick reply box, making it possible to reply to the message without having to actually open the mail app. This makes it possible to do certain activities faster, as long as apps support it.
Coming to insiders this summer
Here’s how Microsoft describes the new multi-step interactive notifications, as discovered by TheWinCentral in the official Windows 10 Platform features roadmap:
“Allow interactive toast notifications that have multiple steps of interactivity. For example, the initial toast has a dropdown with a Next button, and then clicking Next triggers a background task while leaving the toast in a pending state until your app updates the toast with the next step.”
It goes without saying that developers themselves need to be adding multi-step interactive notifications in their apps, but Microsoft will definitely pioneer this feature and make it available across its universal apps in Windows 10.
Most likely, the new notifications should show up in the coming preview builds of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, with Microsoft to allow devs to update their apps later this year in anticipation of the public launch of Redstone 3.