It has been a long time since I last looked at Magento 2's admin area. The last update was several months ago. I had looked through the changelogs, but I and others had some problems logging into the admin area. The problem was that apparently you still had to use the ancient PHP 5.3 version, and the Magento 2 version was not yet compatible with PHP 5.3 (even though PHP 5.5 was already available as a beta version). Since I had not been running PHP 5.3 on my development computer for a while, as it was no longer readily shipped with current operating system updates, I temporarily went without the pleasure. The good news first... with the new Magento 2 version, I was finally able to log in. But clicking the menu only showed me an incomplete page. The reason was that rendering stopped somewhere along the way. A look at the exception log and the Apache error log revealed nothing groundbreaking. As with Magento 1, I then suspected the PHP memory limit. And lo and behold! Magento 2 also ships with an .htaccess file preset to a meager 256MB memory limit. So I quickly turned the limit up to a "modest" 1024MB, because of course I wanted to actually see something now. And just like that, the shop runs and displays a complete admin area.
Here is a short video showing the look and feel with the new jQuery components. There is still a little Prototype in the system, but less and less of it.
As you can see in the video, the main menus in particular have been made more user-friendly. I have often cursed inwardly when I missed the link to System -> Configuration with the mouse and the menu immediately closed again. That is now a thing of the past.
Let's see what has happened under the hood...