ChangeWindows 7
It is time for a change. A major change. Today, we bring you the next generation of ChangeWindows. Ladies and gentlemen, the sun is rising. Welcome to ChangeWindows 7.
The story so far…
ChangeWindows shares its birthday with the Windows Insider Program (well, it was called “Changelog Windows 10” at the time). Ever since, we’ve tagged along for the ride. It’s been a long journey and we’ve had to adapt along the way. As the Windows Insider Program expanded from desktop and 2 preview rings, to the 10 platforms (including the SDK and ISOs) and 8 channels we track today, we had to expand too. We moved from a static website (version 0), to a markdown-powered version (version 1), to a small script to easily manage a database (version 2, 3, and 4) to our current Laravel-powered implementation (version 5, and 6 beta). We introduced our ring/channel-cards (version 2), and their colored versions (version 2.5). Moved from full changelogs on our homepage (version 0), to cards (version 1), to unified, tabbed cards (version 2), and ended up with today’s timeline (version 3 and later).
And that brings us to today, with no plans to stop. But… the way the Insider Program works has shifted yet again in subtle yet (for us) breaking ways. So it was time for us to adapt yet again too. We were working on ChangeWindows 6, which was only going to be a major update to our management tools, not to ChangeWindows itself, but we had to put that work aside. Drop everything and start from scratch.
So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the most over-engineered changelog on earth. Version 7.
A fresh new look…
To address the elephant in the room: we’re still using PHP through the Laravel framework.
Ooh, but the first thing you’ll notice is our updated look. If you preferred our light theme, you’ll notice that most real white has disappeared. We’ve decided to settle on a slight grey-blueish color. If you ked liked our dark theme however, I’ve got bad news for you: we currently don’t have one. It’s on the roadmap, but it wasn’t a priority right now. Other things had to get done first.
Our new UI isn’t plain old HTML and CSS anymore. Instead we’re using React now. The most notable difference between the two is that you will now see a progress bar at the top of our website when navigating around and pages won’t fully reload anymore.
With our new look, we are also introducing an updated logo. I know, I know, ChangeWindows 5 introduced a new logo too before it got reversed back to the logo we’ve been using since version 1. But this one’s for real. Seriously. I actually spend some decent time on this one. Even made it a vector.
…with a *much* better mobile design
With this redesign, we also put a ton more focus into our mobile layout. For ChangeWindows 5, the mobile design began to deteriorate over time and at the end of its life, it was an absolute mess. ChangeWindows 7 aims to fix all of that. As part of this effort, we’re moving the main navigation to the bottom of your screen, the platform selection now consists out of icons, and many parts of our website will now respond much better to smaller widths.
With this revamp, a lot of focus went into making this experience better. We’re not done yet, so more enhancements will follow in the future. ChangeWindows does support pinning to your phone’s homescreen, which will hide the browser UI to provide you an even more app-like experience.
A more detailed timeline
The timeline is getting a few upgrades too. The timeline will now show the version at the right hand side directly, instead of a color-coded dot.
As Microsoft begins adding updates through other means than new builds, we also had to follow there. The Windows Feature Experience Pack is going to become an important factor in keeping Windows up-to-date, and thus we’re now following these updates too.
What’s more, while the timeline previously only showed flights, with ChangeWindows 7 we’re introducing 2 new types of “events” on our timeline: promotions and releases.
A promotion happens every time a channel for the first time gets a flight from a new release for that platform. A release will be added to the timeline every time a release gets a flight for the first time.
Wait… “what are releases,” you ask?
Releases
Ever since ChangeWindows 2, we’ve worked with the concept of “milestones”. A milestone was 1 version of Windows across multiple platforms. This had a few downsides. First of all, this was entirely arbitrary on our side. Second, Xbox had multiple “major” releases within a milestone unlike any other platform. Third, how we versioned them was, yet again, entirely arbitrary. Fourth, the life cycle that each milestone displayed would never be able to match every platform in that milestone and thus was always the PC life cycle.
Introducing releases.
Releases are basically milestone, but now platform-specific. They are actually much more complex than milestones ever were. Unlike milestones, these releases all have their own channels and own statuses related to these channels (this is mostly to make our lives easier as admins).
So, what’s new in comparison to milestones?
- The new “release cards” will show which channels are active within that release.
- Channels are now named per release. LTSC used to be called LTSB before 2018 and starting with ChangeWindows 7, version 1507's and 1607’s long-term supported version is thus called LTSB instead of LTSC. Older versions no longer need to follow in the updated terminology of their modern younger selves.
- The life-cycle is now specific for whatever the platform of that release is. We’ve also drastically redesigned the progress bar to be more responsive and to clearly connect the dates to the point on the progress bar to which they belong.
- Releases now have a proper channels overview.
- Platforms now have a proper releases overview. And unlike the old milestones page, it is now easy to see which releases are, and which aren’t supported.
- Changelogs are now connected to a release, instead of a milestone.
- The platform-and-milestone-specific timeline now takes the full width of the screen again and uses the same design as the home timeline, for much better clarity.
Better Xbox-support
One of the driving factors behind this major refactoring of how ChangeWindows works was Xbox. Unlike any other platform, Xbox used to have multiple feature updates within a milestone. As a matter of fact, the version 2004 milestone would have ended up with about 12 feature updates for Xbox. This was madness.
Today’s major update improves all of that. Since platforms no longer have to pay attention to each other on ChangeWindows, we can now split each version of Xbox up properly. And thus we did just that. This drastically improves our Xbox-coverage.
But we’re not done just yet.
Xbox is the most active platform that we report on. There is almost daily at least 1 flight in any Xbox channel. As a result our ChangeWindows handle is being updated with that information as well. But… What if you’re just interested in Xbox? Well, introducing ChangeXbox.
ChangeXbox is a new Twitter account that will be tweeting out every flight we publish to ChangeWindows. If you follow ChangeWindows already, nothing will change for you except that you’ll see a different avatar for all Xbox flights. The ChangeXbox-account will be tweeting all the Xbox flights, and ChangeWindows will retweet ChangeXbox.
Better tweets
While we’re on the topic of Twitter; another “major” change in how you interact with ChangeWindows is our tweets. We previously would tweet out the information in a sentence, starting with ChangeWindows 7 tweets will be more visual with the use of emojis as clear data. This will make it much easier to scan through the tweet to find any data you may consider relevant.
Platforms as active, legacy, and tools
A new option for us is now to display platforms as active/inactive, legacy, and tools. Whether or not a platform is active will determine if it will appear in the timeline sidebar. This option is created for platforms that no longer receive updates.
The new “legacy” option allows us to hide platforms from the main navigation into the “Legacy”-menu. Legacy platforms aren’t necessarily inactive. This cleans up our navigation, as it will remove Mobile and IoT.
Finally, platforms can now be marked as “tools”. This option was created for ISOs and SDKs. They won’t show up in the page-navigation on Platforms. But you will still see them on the timeline navigation.
The new Channels page
We’re also updating the “Rings”-page to Channels. This minor branding update does however come with some significant feature changes. The main overview has not changed much, beyond the visual refresh. It’s the platform pages that are interesting here.
Previously, the platform pages would show all active rings for all active releases. This meant that the day a ring would de-activate, it would also disappear from this page. ChangeWindows 7 won’t do that anymore and instead we’ll show you a grayed-out flight for that channel. This way you can see the final build for any given channel in one overview.
Improvements to what we track
ChangeWindows 7 also makes some content-related improvements.
- 10X’s Beta Channel is now listed. The platform itself is listed as legacy and inactive.
- For both SDK and ISO, we’ll now list the stable and unstable releases separate from each other, instead of marking every release of both as stable.
- Azure Stack HCI is now tracked.
Improved admin tools
This update also brings a lot of changes to our admin tools.
Revamped flight editor
Our old flight publisher was basically 2 fields and a set of checkboxes. The 2 fields contained the version and date, the checkboxes were for each ring by platform. ChangeWindows would for itself decide which milestone that flight could belong to, and go with that. This was sometimes unpredictable. Furthermore, while this was fine when there were 5 different versions, today we’re already up to 13 and remembering which channels is active by platform for which version has turned into a painful nightmare that was prone to errors.
We fixed that.
ChangeWindows 7, with major thanks to our new Releases system, will show beforehand which platform channels are eligible to receive a release, and if any channel within a release is unsupported it is marked as such. This will be, especially for Patch Tuesdays, a much needed aid in eliminating errors when publishing new flights.
Platform-specific channels, and release-specific platform channels
One of the largest architectural changes to ChangeWindows. Previously, there were 8 shared rings across all platforms. These were assigned names by a simple (nested) switch statement. It was a mess.
ChangeWindows 7 handles things differently. Platforms now have their individual channels. These channels have their color and primary name set at the platform-level. Whenever a new release is made for a platform, a “release channel” can be created. These contain the full name and shortened name specific for that release (this makes the distinctions like LTSC and LTSB between releases possible). A release channel is what holds all flights of a release.
So instead of 8 channels across everything, we now have basically anywhere from 1 to 6 channels for each release. This is a much more complex system to handle it, but it is more accurate which — in my book — is a major plus.
Improved Twitter integration
A major part of supporting the ChangeXbox Twitter-handle was building in support for multiple Twitter-handles in the first place. For this, new tools to store Twitter authentication have been made as well as a way to connect a platform to both its primary Twitter-handle, and the Twitter-handle that will retweet the primary handle by default. The later is mostly so that ChangeWindows can retweet all flights from ChangeXbox.
With this, I also wanted to make a very simple templating engine for the tweets we send out. So if we ever need to change the tweet-formatting, we can just do so from the admin panel.
The things that are gone
Not all things are returning in ChangeWindows 7.
- Obviously, we’re done with milestones.
- The BuildFeed Archive won’t be part of ChangeWindows for the foreseeable future.
For the future
…but there are things that aren’t in today’s update that we are still working on.
- Dark mode. Because of course.
- The pagination currently is a simple previous-next pagination, detailed pagination will be coming later.
- We have an issue tracker for this.
Final notes
This is a major revamp of ChangeWindows and we’re looking forward to where we’re taking it next. Welcome to ChangeWindows 7.
