Windows10 tips

Thanks to the recent Creators Update for Windows 10, we now have a host of new privacy controls to play with. With these controls you can decide what information you give out to third parties. For example, you can control whether or not you want websites to access your language list, which helps them provide content more geared to you and more accessible to you. Or you can control whether apps can access a unique ID of you as a user. This ID helps them track you and provide you with more targeted adverts. Maybe you want all of these features turned on? At least, the choice is yours now.

We all know how useful keyboard shortcuts can be if used well. With the addition of virtual desktop and the shift away from some of the panel display of Windows 8, here are a couple of handy shortcuts which could speed up your workflow:

• To create a new Virtual Desktop – Windows + CTRL + D
• To close the current Virtual Desktop – Windows + CTRL + F4
• To switch to the next Virtual Desktop in the queue – Windows + CTRL + Right Arrow
• To switch to the previous Virtual Desktop in the queue – Windows + CTRL + Left Arrow
• To open the Task View – Windows + Tab
• To toggle Cortana listening – Windows + Ctrl + C
• To launch Cortana – Windows + S,

or alternatively: “Hey Cortana”

• To snap apps to the top of bottom of a screen – Windows + Up / Down Arrow

Task view is just a simple add-on to the Virtual Desktop feature. This helps you easily manage which windows you want to have in which desktop. It acts as an overview of your different windows and helps you categorize your work so that you can find it more easily. If you find yourself enjoying the Virtual Desktop then you should use the task view to help you manage it more easily. It’s only a simple little feature, but it’s included for the organized folk out there.

One of the first things to do in any article about Windows 10 is to congratulate Microsoft for abandoning Windows 8. The second thing to do is to thank them for bringing in a number of features which have been staples of MacOS and certain Linux environments for a while. The main one worth mentioning here is the introduction of Virtual Desktop. This allows you to navigate your working environments easily and to separate out your workspaces. For instance, I have one workspace now with Slack, Trello, Google sheets, Airtable, and other work-related resources. I have another one with some interesting articles about the upcoming UK general election in a separate workspace for me to pop over to on my breaks. Separating my workspaces helps me remain focused and the virtual desktop feature seems to understand that. Good addition.

Let’s kick off with one of the more exciting tips! The future of voice commands! I really like the concept of Cortana. I find her to be generally useful, or at least, to have a lot of potential. The main gripe I had with Cortana is that she would always open web pages in Edge and use Bing as the search instead of Google. I wouldn’t use either of those tools normally, so it just seemed out of my normal workflow to have Cortana drag me into different windows every time I wanted to employ her. To fix this, you can find the chrome extension Chrometana. It does exactly what you would expect it to do. It forces Cortana to use Chrome and Google to operate. It’s a small change, but one which has made this feature much more useful for me.