According to numerous reports, this year, Microsoft plans to introduce a major Windows 10 redesign codenamed "Sun Valley." The company wants to "rejuvenate" its flagship product and make it more modern and appealing. These plans are yet to materialize. Although a few apps have already received a bit of the new design, such as Alarms & Clock app or the touch keyboard, the rest of the system remains unchanged. While die-hard fans of Windows 10 are waiting for a big announcement, Microsoft has already added some new design pieces to core components of the OS in latest preview builds.
TheXamlGuy on Twitter was the first to discover a new floating menu for jump lists in Windows 10. If you are not familiar with jump lists, they are the menus that appear on the screen when you right-click an icon on the taskbar. In the current stable Windows 10 version, jump lists have sharp corners - like everything else in the UI - and appear attached to the taskbar when invoked.
A new menu version has rounded corners, and it is "floating" above the icon with a small gap. You can see a quick comparison between the two versions in the screenshot. Bear in mind that the transparent border around the jump list is temporary. The final version will ship without it.
The new jump lists menu design is already available in latest Windows 10 preview builds. To enable it, you need to debug the shellexperiencehost.exe process in Visual Studio and enable the JumpListRestyledAcrylic experimental flag. It clearly offers too little to bother with operations like this, but you can see where Microsoft is heading with the design refresh in Windows 10. The company plans to bring Windows 10X’s design to regular Windows versions, and it plans to apply the similar treatment to other parts of the OS: Action Center, Start Menu, Control Center, context menus, etc. We expect Microsoft to announce the first major parts of the upcoming redesign somewhere this summer.
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