PowerToys 0.102 has moved Color Picker and Text Extractor to WinUI 3, joining Image Resizer, Quick Accent, Mouse Jump, and the Keyboard Manager editor, which all switched over this year. Microsoft is also tracking the rest of PowerToys’ old WPF interfaces in a public GitHub issue, with FancyZones and Workspaces up next.

In case you didn’t know it already, PowerToys is open source, and Microsoft didn’t have to undertake a massive operation to rewrite tools that already worked well for power users. Yet, the team is doing it anyway, at a time when the company hopes developers will steer away from web apps for Windows 11, after years of WinUI missing basic controls.

PowerToys 0.102 rebuilds Color Picker and Text Extractor in WinUI 3

PowerToys 0.102 rolled out on October 21, and Microsoft’s Niels Laute wrote in the release announcement that “Color Picker and Text Extractor also move to WinUI 3.” Color Picker gets a new overlay, editor and magnifier, and “Your existing shortcuts and settings carry over.”

I checked the notes and tested it and it’s actually more than a new coat of paint. The Color Picker migration moved the picking overlay, color editor, zoom magnifier, settings and Win32 input hooks off WPF.

One of my favourite tools, Text Extractor, which grabs text from anywhere on your screen with Win + Shift + T, was surprisingly trickier. WPF gives developers a transparent overlay for free, but WinUI 3 doesn’t (yet another limitation of the newer framework that Microsoft is pushing), so the team rebuilt the snipping overlay as one borderless window per display and rewrote its positioning for mixed-DPI setups.

The OCR, formatting and table detection code also moved into a separate PowerOCR.Core library that doesn’t depend on any UI framework.

Six PowerToys tools have moved to WinUI 3 this year

PowerToys tool	Moved to WinUI 3 in	Release date
Keyboard Manager editor	0.98 (preview), 0.100 (default)	March 17, June 9
Image Resizer	0.99	April 28
Quick Accent, Mouse Jump	0.101	August 25
Color Picker, Text Extractor	0.102	October 21

 

When the new Keyboard Manager editor came in 0.98, Microsoft said “The UI has been rebuilt from the ground up using WinUI 3, making it easier for us to maintain and improve going forward.” Image Resizer followed with “a more modern look and improved consistency with the rest of PowerToys.”

But I did some more digging and found that the list is far bigger than what’s shown in the migration tracker. Windows Latest went through the PowerToys source code on GitHub (as of November 5), and Command Palette, Peek, Advanced Paste, PowerRename, Registry Preview, Hosts File Editor, Environment Variables, File Locksmith, Screen Ruler, PowerDisplay and the new Shortcut Guide also have WinUI 3 interfaces.

In total, 17 utilities, plus the Settings app, now use Microsoft’s native framework. The only interfaces still on WPF are the FancyZones editor, Workspaces and PowerToys Run, while Mouse Without Borders uses Windows Forms.

Why Microsoft is moving PowerToys from WPF to WinUI 3

PowerToys developer Yu Leng opened the migration issue on March 24, explaining that “PowerToys’ utilities come from various sources and have been completed over a wide period of time, that makes our codebase have WPF, WinUI3, WinForms, C++ UI code now. This makes the new contributor more confused and hard to maintain.”

Leng adds that “WinUI 3 provides a modern UI and makes sure that our experiences fit in with the Windows 11 look and feel.”

There’s a size benefit too. PowerToys 0.100.2 takes up 960MB on disk with a 271.7MB installer, partly because it bundles the WPF and Windows Forms runtime twice, as shared libraries pull WPF into modules that are otherwise pure WinUI 3. Microsoft estimates that removing all WPF would cut about 85MB from the install and 30–38MB from the installer, and dropping Windows Forms too could push the savings to 138MB.

These are projections from the GitHub issue, and they haven’t shipped yet. Of course, 85MB is nothing on a 1TB SSD, but PowerToys has been bloating up with every new utility, so I’ll take it.

FancyZones and Workspaces are next, but PowerToys Run is staying on WPF

FancyZones’ layout editor is getting a redesign along with its migration. “FancyZones is a tricky one. Let’s also rethink its UX while we are at it because it has some quirks and we could do improvements there,” Laute wrote on GitHub in June, and an early draft of the migration was later closed without merging.

Workspaces’ editor and launcher are also in progress, held back by a transparent launch overlay, WPF page navigation, and a shared library that still depends on WPF.

Credit where it’s due, Microsoft isn’t forcing WinUI 3 where it doesn’t fit. PowerToys Run won’t migrate because its plugin system exposes WPF types to more than 22 plugins, and the issue says a rewrite “would break the plugin ecosystem for little UI gain.” The STL thumbnail provider has no UI at all, and its 3D rendering depends on WPF’s Media3D, which has no WinUI 3 equivalent.

Microsoft wants third-party developers to build native WinUI apps again

As you’d already know, a big reason Windows 11 is full of web wrappers is that WinUI had “a ton of feature gaps in the platform,” as Microsoft’s Chris Anderson admitted at Build 2026. Many developers who couldn’t find a native data grid or chart control simply shipped WebView2 apps, and hilariously, Microsoft’s favourite child, the infamous Copilot app, is a web app too.

Now, Microsoft says it has “no intention of building a new framework,” and that “a lot of the first-party features coming from Microsoft” will be built on top of WinUI. WinUI development has moved to GitHub; Microsoft has admitted native apps hog RAM and released experimental memory fixes, TableView and Chart controls, and even Windows 11’s ancient defrag tool is on the WinUI to-do list.

Laute, who is a product manager for both PowerToys and WinUI, also released WinUI Gallery 3.0 on October 13 so developers can try upcoming controls before they reach a stable release. Third-party developers have heard promises before, as Silverlight and UWP fans would tell you, which is why Microsoft had to clarify that WinUI isn’t being killed this time.

PowerToys is a bigger deal here than its size suggests, as it’s a popular, open-source Microsoft app that any developer can study, and it shows WinUI 3 can replace WPF in tools people use every day. If Microsoft wants 100% native apps on Windows 11, it needs more examples like this, and fewer Copilot web wrappers.

As someone who uninstalled WhatsApp after it turned into a WebView2 wrapper, and who is eagerly waiting for the new native Discord app, I, for one, hope native apps really are back.

The post Microsoft is betting on native WinUI over web app slop across Windows 11, and even Color Picker and Text Extractor have moved to it in PowerToys appeared first on Windows Latest

According to Bloomberg, Apple is cutting employee AI spending limits to reduce costs, lowering some engineers from $300 to $200 per day and considering limits as low as $100, with some teams capped at $25. Employees are also being encouraged to use cheaper models or on-device AI. MacRumors reports: Engineers at Apple have the largest budgets because using AI for coding can consume a large number of tokens. Apple lets employees use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other models. Some Apple employees told Bloomberg that few were using their full $300 daily limit, so the savings may be small. Apple has also hired outside productivity consultants for some divisions. Combined with the AI cost cuts, the reviews have fueled worries about possible restructuring.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta now lets you have voice conversations with your Muse AI agent in real time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today.

The feature has been rolled out to me, and I gave it a spin on the iOS app while writing this article. As you chat with your Muse agent, the avatar at the top of your conversation animates in time with the words that it's saying. You can also change the tone of the voice by just asking your agent about what you want and letting it decide or by browsing through a bunch of options in the avatar settings.

In my brief tests, my Muse agent responds quickly over voice, though it occasionally pauses while it's looking up infor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It's the year 2026 and the Federal Aviation Administration is still running critical pieces of American airspace on 3.5-inch magnetic floppy disks.

But those technology artifacts could be headed for the dustbin after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced an effort to ditch floppy disks in favor of a new digital system.

Duffy announced Thursday that the FAA is rolling out the Enterprise - Information Display System (E-IDS) to replace four legacy setups across more than 400 air traffic control facilities. E-IDS aggregates real-time weather alerts, equipment outages, restricted airspace changes, and pilot reports onto a modern digit …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Turn your sketches into functional apps using Gemini. Upload your drawings to the Canvas tool to generate and refine code instantly. Try it now.

Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash brings native 15-second video generation and editing, stronger consistency, and 30% lower pricing.