Microsoft's PowerToys just received an update that removes the last barrier to me using Workspaces within the app, and I'd be willing to bet I'm not the only one happy to see the change. With the jump to version 0.87.0, the app now supports Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), within Workspaces. That means you can save a layout of apps and PWAs on your desktop that you can launch with the push of a button.
Before the most recent update to PowerToys, you could not set Workspaces to include a PWA. Well, you could click "capture," which made it seem like you had saved the PWA as part of a workspace, but it actually just saved an instance of whichever browser powered the PWA. Now, you can have a workspace launch a specific PWA rather than just a browser window.
The update makes the Workspaces feature much more useful since the best experience for many services comes in the form of a PWA rather than a dedicated app.
PowerToys v0.87.0 improves the app in several other ways as well, such as adding an option to have the Screen Ruler utility show measurements in inches, centimeters, and millimeters.
Below are the highlights and release notes for PowerToys v0.87.0, as shared by Microsoft on GitHub.
PowerToys v0.87.0
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Highlights
- Advanced Paste has a new feature called "Advanced AI" that uses Semantic Kernel to allow setting up the orchestration of sequential clipboard transformations.
- Workspaces supports Progressive Web Applications.
- Workspaces has a new feature to move existing windows instead of creating new ones.
- Mouse Jump added new settings to allow customization of screens pop-up. Thanks @mikeclayton!
- New+ now works on Windows 10. Thanks @cgaarden!
- Quick Accent allows selecting the character sets that should appear on the UI. Thanks @Sirozha1337!
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Advanced Paste
- Added a new optional feature allowing using AI to set up the orchestration of sequential clipboard transformations.
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Awake
- Initialization, logging and tray icon setup improvements. Thanks @dend!
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File Explorer add-ons
- Preview Pane extensions now use the PerMonitorV2 DPI mode to fix errors on different scales. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
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Keyboard Manager.
- Added labels to the IME On, IME Off keys. Thanks @kit494way!
- Fixed an issue that caused the Shift key to remain stuck if a numpad key was mapped to the Shift key.
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Monaco Preview
- Added support for .ahk files to be shown as a plaintext file in Peek and File Explorer add-ons. Thanks @daverayment!
- Added support for .ion files to be shown as a plaintext file in Peek and File Explorer add-ons. Thanks @octastylos-pseudodipteros!
- Added support for syntax highlighting for .srt files in Peek and File Explorer add-ons. Thanks @PesBandi!
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Mouse Jump
- Allow customizing the appearance of the UI of the Mouse Jump pop-up. Thanks @mikeclayton!
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New+
- Added support for Windows 10. Thanks @cgaarden!
- Fixed an issue causing the renaming of new files to not trigger some times. Thanks @cgaarden!
- Updated the New+ icons. Thanks @niels9001!
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Peek
- Peek now checks local capabilities to decide what image formats Image Previewer is able to support. Thanks @daverayment!
- Fixed an issue causing the Code Files Previewer to not load correctly under certain conditions. Thanks @daverayment!
- Refactored, improved and fixed logging when loading the user settings file. Thanks @daverayment!
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PowerToys Run
- Added a scoring function for proper ordering of the WindowWalker plugin results. Thanks @andbartol!
- Added UUIDv7 support to the ValueGenerator plugin. Thanks @frederik-hoeft!
- The calculator plugin now allows scientific notation numbers with a lowercase 'e'. Thanks @PesBandi!
- Ported the UI from WPF-UI to .NET 9 WPF, to fix "Desktop composition is disabled" crashes.
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Quick Accent
- Added a setting to allow selecting which character sets to show. Thanks @Sirozha1337!
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Screen Ruler
- Added a Setting to also allow showing measurements in inches, centimeters or millimeters. Thanks @Sophanatprime!
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Settings
- Fixed an issue causing all the links to milestones in the "What's new?" OOBE page to point to the same milestone.
- Removed extra space from the Welcome page. Thanks @agarwalishita!
- Updated left navigation bar icons. Thanks @niels9001!
- Fixed accessibility issues in the dashboard page. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
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Workspaces
- Added support for Progressive Web Applications to Workspaces.
- Implemented a feature to move existing windows instead of creating new ones.
- Fixed a crash when opening the workspaces editor that was caused by passing incorrect encoder parameters when saving Bitmap files.
- Workspaces editor position is now saved so that we can start it at the same position when we open it again.
- Fixed an issue causing many instances of the same application to be put in the same position instead of the intended position due to timer issues.
- Fixed detection of exact application version when many versions of the same application are installed.
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Documentation
- Improved language in CONTRIBUTE.md. Thanks @sanskaarz!
- Added Bilibili plugin mention to thirdPartyRunPlugins.md. Thanks @Whuihuan!
- Added CanIUse and TailwindCSS plugins mention to thirdPartyRunPlugins.md. Thanks @skttl!
- Added HttpStatusCodes plugin mention to thirdPartyRunPlugins.md. Thanks @grzhan!
- Updated COMMUNITY.md with more contributors.
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Development
- Upgraded to .NET 9. Thanks @snickler!
- Fixed building on Visual Studio 17.12.
- Upgraded the System.IO.Abstractions dependency to 21.0.29. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
- Upgraded the WindowsAppSDK dependency to 1.6.241114003. Thanks @shuaiyuanxx!
- Upgraded the MSTest dependency to 3.6.3. Thanks @Youssef1313!
- Upgraded the check-spelling CI dependency to 0.0.24 and fixed related spell checking issues. Thanks @jsoref!
- Removed duplicate names from the spellcheck allowed names file. Thanks @htcfreek!
- Improved logging of asynchronous methods call stacks when logging an error.
- Created a MSBuild props file to be imported by other projects to enable AOT support.
- Made the Peek utility source code AOT compatible.
- Updated .editorconfig rules to relax squiggly IDE errors in Visual Studio 17.12. Thanks @snickler!
- Moved Xaml.Styler from the root to the src folder.
