Mining Redstone 4: Timeline (Premium)

Last month, I dove deep on the Fluent Design System, the new design language for Windows 10. Today, I’d like to tackle a much meatier new Windows 10 feature called Timeline.

First unveiled at Build 2017 way back in May, Timeline strikes at the heart of what I believe to be the focus of the next Windows 10 version, currently codenamed Redstone 4: Productivity.

So what is it?

Timeline extends the multitasking capabilities in Windows to includes activities from other PCs and, as exciting, activities that happened earlier in time. The idea here is that many Windows users—not just power users, but even mainstream users—now use multiple PCs and devices, and they work on projects over periods of time.

From a user experience standpoint, Timeline appears in Windows 10’s Task View display, which you access, as before, by selecting the Task View button in the taskbar or by typing WINKEY + TAB. In previous versions of Windows 10, Task View displayed thumbnails for all of your open apps and other windows, plus a “New desktop” button and/or thumbnails for any virtual desktops you may be using.

In Windows 10 “Redstone 4,” Task View now displays thumbnails for activities—e.g. apps you ran and other windows you opened—that you performed earlier in time, from the current PC, from other PCs, and from your mobile devices. These activities are grouped by time, and you can scroll vertically to see more and, in effect, go back in time.

Timeline provides ways for you to dive into activities, too, so you can see and access more. For example, you can toggle the view of any time period between “See all” and “See only top activities,” depending on your needs at the time.

Like so many other features, Timeline sounds great in theory. But like so many other features, it also relies on developer buy-in. And this has been a tricky problem for Microsoft—and for Windows 10 users—so far. For example, the My People feature that debuted in the Fall Creators Update also relies on developers to support it explicitly in their apps. But to date, very few have. And for the most part, anyone who wishes to use this feature still has to stick with a handful of compatible apps that are built-in to Windows 10.

Microsoft claims that “developers are working hard to enhance their apps” to support Timeline. And … maybe they are. But in the initial release for Windows Insiders, Timeline only explicitly supports a handful of Microsoft apps, including Microsoft Edge, Maps, News, Money, Sports, and Weather from Windows 10, and Microsoft Office apps like Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

To address this potential Achilles Heel, Microsoft has already published guidelines to help developers create Timeline-compatible activities. Behind the scenes, these activities are written to the Microsoft Graph, a data store in the Microsoft Azure cloud that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate insights based on a user’s or organization’s data on the fly. Timeline-compatible apps store information about where you were in the app, or what you were doing. And then Cortana accesses this data on your behalf, so that you can pick up where you left off, perhaps on a different PC or mobile device.

Integration with Cortana makes sense since Microsoft’s digital personal assistant is a key conduit between PCs and Android and iOS mobile devices for those in the Microsoft ecosystem. And Cortana will work proactively by accessing your graph and suggesting activities that you may wish to resume as you switch between your PCs and devices.

From a UI perspective, these activities are presented in Windows 10 as adaptive cards that can be can simple—with the app name and icon, and a title—or they can be much more detailed, with a description, a graphic, and other data. It’s not yet clear how or even where they will apear on mobile devices, or what the—ahem—timeline is for making that happen.

But thinking just about Windows 10 for a moment, you can see how this feature will be useful, and why it is possible it will see much more traction than the original Task View and virtual desktop features that Microsoft added with the original version of Windows 10. Timeline is semi-discoverable —though most users are probably more familiar with ALT + TAB than WINKEY + TAB—and is much more approachable than virtual desktops.

That’s good for mainstream users. But Timeline will also benefit all users, including power users, because it is persistent. That is, the biggest issue with virtual desktops for those who do use this feature is that these desktops disappear when you reboot the PC. They’re not persistent. Because your Timeline data is written to the Microsoft Graph and is broadcast to all of your PCs and devices, your activities will always be available to you. You can pick up where you left off, across multiple PCs and devices.

When you compare a truly useful feature like Timeline to some of the big bucket additions in the current Windows 10 version, you can see how profound this is. Aside from OneDrive Files on Demand, most of the new features benefit only small groups of users. But Timeline will benefit many or even most Windows 10 users. It’s the first major change to Windows multitasking since virtual desktops, and the first major change to Windows multitasking that real people will actually use in … decades? A long time.

This is exciting, even with the qualifier that developers will need to update their apps to fully support it. Cross your fingers: This is a meaningful improvement to Windows 10.