It"s Wednesday at 10am PT, and that can only mean one thing. There"s a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build in the Dev channel. This week"s build is 20241, and as usual, not much has changed, although there are a few things.
The Dev channel gets weekly builds from the rs_prerelease branch, so it"s in a perpetual state of prerelease and it"s not tied to a feature update. At some point, features get promoted to the Beta channel, which is actually a preview for the next feature update. Unfortunately, no one actually knows what the next feature update is, and Microsoft isn"t talking about it. The most recent update, 20H2, was released this week, and 21H1 might be canceled entirely in favor of a Windows 10X release.
As for what"s new in this build, we"re now seeing theme-aware splash screens, so you"ll see light and dark splash screens instead of accent-colored ones. Here"s the full changelog:
Introducing theme-aware splash screens for apps
Building on theme-aware tiles in Start, we’re introducing theme-aware splash screens for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. Now, when an eligible UWP app is launched, the splash screen color will match your default app mode. For example, if you have light theme turned on, you’ll see a light theme splash screen, and if you have dark theme turned on (for the “default app mode”) then you’ll see a dark theme splash screen.
Settings app splash screen before and after in light theme:
Settings app splash screen before and after in dark theme:
The following apps support theme-aware splash screens today:
- Settings
- Store
- Windows Security
- Alarms & Clock
- Calculator
- Maps
- Voice Recorder
- Groove
- Movies & TV
- Snip & Sketch
- Microsoft ToDo
- Office
- Feedback Hub
- Microsoft Solitaire Collection
Over time, more apps will be updated via the Store to support having a theme-aware splash screen.
This feature is rolling out to a subset of Insiders in the Dev Channel at first to help us quickly identify issues that may impact performance and reliability. Rest assured they will be gradually rolling out to everyone in the Dev Channel.
Enhancing your defrag experience
We’re making a few changes to the Optimize Drives page (Settings > System > Storage > Optimize Drives), including:
- Adding a new “Advanced View” checkbox to list all volumes including hidden volumes. Please note we’re still getting this one up and running, so you’ll see the checkbox in this build, but may not notice any differences when you click it.
- Listing more details in the “Current status” column when volumes are not available for defrag (for example, “Partition type not supported” and “File system type not supported”).
- Adding support for pressing F5 to refresh.
It"s unclear why only that small subset of apps supports the theme-aware splash screen, rather than anything with a transparent splash screen.
As always, you can grab today"s build via Windows Update. If you"re not on the Dev channel yet, you can enroll through the Windows Insider Program tab in Settings.