Microsoft Starts Testing Its Long-Promised Windows 10 Timeline Feature

When Microsoft announced the update of Windows 10 Fall Creators, one of the most interesting features that the company demonstrated was Timeline, which allows it to find and resume its recent activities as it moves between computers and iOS and Android phones. It's basically a global task view, backed by Microsoft's cloud services. Like other features, Timeline was not ready for the Fall Creators update, so it's only today that Timeline is making its debut in the latest draft version of Windows 10 Insider (and only for those users who are in the fast ring experimental, as well as those who opted for the Skip Ahead constructions).

The basic idea here is to provide you with an easy-to-use overview of all your recent activities, be it a document you were working on in Word or on a website you were viewing on Edge (maybe even on an Android phone), and then leave it when you return to your laptop or your desk in the office. The timeline will highlight those documents you probably want to work on, but it will also present you with a complete list of your recent activities, organized by hour. Cortana can also remind you of activities that you think you probably want to resume when you switch devices.

If you have already installed the last update, the new view of the timeline will be located behind the new task view icon in the taskbar, or you can access by pressing the Windows key plus the tab.

It is worth noting that application developers have to explicitly admit this feature in their applications. At this time, this means that only Microsoft Edge scanning and Microsoft Office documents are supported, as well as activities in Windows 10 applications, such as Maps, News, Money, Sports and Weather.

In addition to numerous updates for the Edge browser, another new feature that really seems quite useful is Sets (which the company first announced last month, although only a subset of Insider users will get it with this version). The idea here, says Microsoft, is to allow you to group documents, other files and applications that belong to a particular task and make them available to you with a single click.

Perhaps a better way to think about this is as universal tabs that allow you to group applications such as Word, OneNote and your browser into a single window that allows you to switch between activities as you would between the browser tabs.

As usual, you can find a complete list of all the changes in this release (and there are many) here.