Some screenshots appeared on the web showing new designs of Windows that Microsoft plans to release hater this year with an update. Aero Glass certainly comes to mind here.
The photos have been posted at mspoweruser.com here's an overview of the content:
Right of the bat I don’t want readers to be fooled by those who suggest this is a major or a complete overhaul of Windows 10’s design language. In fact, it’s a fairly minor update that builds on the current Windows 10 UI (aka MDL2).
Nevertheless, change is always exciting, so here’s an early look at NEON.
Project NEON will heavily focus on animations, simplicity, and consistency – essentially bringing back Windows 7’s Aero Glass and mixing it up with animations like the ones from the Windows Phone 8/7 era.
Microsoft is introducing a new component called “Acrylic” to the Windows 10 design, which is essentially blur in the background, sidebar or the navigation of the app. These are known as “Side-Nav Acrylic”, “Background Acrylic” and “In-App Acrylic” respectively.
another concept of the Outlook Mail and Calendar app where we get to see the sidebar with a blurred background, and all the other basic elements that seem to follow a consistent design guideline. As shown in the above concept, hovering over a navigation item or element shows a backdrop to make it feel like a natural interaction. On a PC, the background color will follow your mouse’s pointer – but on a HoloLens, it’ll presumably follow your gaze or HoloLens’ clicker.
I have seen a few other video concepts of Project NEON which show off some of the animations in the UI – and to put it simply, these animations are stupendously smooth. Then again, these are just concepts and the “real deal” will likely be a lot different, for better or worse. If you look closely it looks like Microsoft is also tweaking the design of the taskbar – but we doubt Microsoft will actually make these changes when it ships NEON later this year. There are a lot of other neat little things Microsoft is planning internally for NEON as well. However, do keep in mind that these are just early plans and concepts, so the timeline regarding NEON is quite uncertain at this point of development. Microsoft wants to get the foundation laid for NEON with Redstone 3, which should mean we will start seeing NEON on some of Microsoft’s own apps with the Redstone 3 release. As for the third-party, independent developers, they will likely be able to start implementing NEON into their apps as well with Redstone 3 but I was not able to confirm this with multiple sources. Redstone 3 is expected to get released sometime later this year, following the release of Redstone 2 (the “Creators Update”) which is set to be released this April.
