• Examining the Start screen
• Working with tiles
• Customizing the Start screen
• Working with Metro-style apps
• Accessing charms and the edge UI
• Finding more apps in the Windows Store
• Understanding contracts
• Working with hardware devices and peripherals
You don’t have to spend too much time with Windows 8 before it hits you: This Windows version is like nothing that’s come before. The biggest and most visual change, of course, is the new Metro environment, which includes the Start screen, various full-screen Metro-style apps, and several Metro user experiences that all sit on a brand-new runtime engine called WinRT. Not only does Windows 8 look different from its predecessors, it really is a brand-new operating system, built from scratch to meet the needs of today’s quickly evolving technology landscape. Yes, all your old desktop applications and hardware devices still work. But the underpinnings of Windows—its soul, really—has completely changed.
This chapter dives deep into the new Metro environment and explains how it works and why it works the way it does. You’ll look at how to use this new UI on PCs of all kinds—including desktop, laptop, tablet, and hybrid devices—and how you can get the most out of it regardless of the hardware you’re using. You’ll also look at the hidden new features available to the Start screen and the new Metro-style apps that run on top of this environment. In Windows 8, it may seem like everything has changed, and in many ways it has. There are only two ways to face change as dramatic as this: fear or excitement. We choose the latter. And if you get through this chapter with us, you will, too.
One of the tough decisions we had with this book concerned naming conventions. See, we think names are important. They provide a simple and obvious way to refer to the things we’re describing throughout the book. It’s nice to be able to point out a new on-screen gadget and tell you, hey, look, that’s the new thingamawhatsis or whatever.
Unfortunately, there’s a new trend at Microsoft where the (we assume) well-intentioned designers behind all the fun new interfaces in Windows 8 not only don’t want to name things, but seem actively engaged in rewriting history by retroactively simplifying the names of objects that appeared in previous Windows versions. So the Start Menu is now simply called Start. That way, when we move forward to Windows 8, Microsoft can claim that Start— or, more pretentiously, the Start experience—works like before but is now a full-screen experience and not a menu. Even though in reality, they’re completely different.
So it is with the Metro environment. Microsoft does not refer to the Metro environment as anything in particular; they just claim that it’s Windows, generically, as if wanting or needing to call out these completely new and different user experiences was a ludicrous notion. Indeed, right after it completed Windows 8, Microsoft decreed that it would not use the term Metro to describe these new experiences, ostensibly for legal reasons.
We’re not buying into this. In the interests of clarity, we’re naming things. And in those places where Microsoft refuses to name names, we’re giving them names. And sometimes we’re deviating from the way Microsoft does things. But to be clear, we’re doing this for you, to make things obvious and simpler, and to prevent clever or lengthy turns of word that would annoy all of us.
For example, Microsoft has gotten the app bug. Everything to them is an app these days. And that includes new Metro-style apps—those apps that run in the new environment described in this chapter—as well as old-school, Windows desktop-based applications. Folks, desktop applications are not apps. They’re applications. And we differentiate them from Metro-style apps—because they are very different—by giving them a different name. So when we use the term app, we’re referring only to Metro-style apps. When we use the term application, we’re referring only to desktop-based applications.
Ditto for Metro. Microsoft refuses to name this environment, or even use the term Metro, but we’re not so shy. There are two main user experiences in Windows 8, and while one is the desktop environment we all know and love from previous Windows versions, the other is… Metro. At least that’s what we’re calling it.
Sometimes, of course, Microsoft does get it right. In Windows 7, for example, there was a feature called Start Menu Search, which we liked quite a bit. In Windows 8, this has been replaced by something we’d be inclined to call Start Screen Search, which will make a lot more sense once you see it in action. But Microsoft’s name for this feature, which it has retroactively applied to the Windows 7 feature as well, is Start Search. And you know what? That works just fine, since it’s clear and obvious, and simpler. Ultimately, we’re just trying to be pragmatic here.
Times They Are A-Changin’: The New Windows Shell
In previous versions of Windows, you would boot the PC (or wake it from Sleep mode), provide your login credentials when prompted (after bypassing the lock screen if using a corporate-connected domain account), and then be presented with the Windows desktop. The desktop was only part of a wider series of applications and services known as the Windows shell. And in all of the versions of Windows released over the past 15 years or more, this shell was called Windows Explorer, or simply Explorer.
In Windows 8, this entire sequence of events is generally unchanged. But the specifics are all new, creating what is in effect an entirely new experience.
Now, your PC’s boot process is measured in just a handful of seconds—under 20, certainly, and well under 10 for most SSD-based systems—and waking from sleep is near simultaneous. The lock screen is always present by default, whether you’re using your own PC or one from work. When you sign in—Microsoft no longer uses the terms
Figure 3-1: It’s not your father’s Windows.
In Windows 3.x, Program Manager was the shell. And in Windows 95, you could still run Program Manager as an application if you wanted to. So Microsoft making the new and old available simultaneously is not unprecedented.
Oddly enough, however, the familiar desktop and Explorer interfaces are still present in Windows 8, though in keeping with the “everything is new again” approach in this release, even Windows Explorer has been renamed, to File Explorer. This lets you switch back and forth between the new shell, along with its apps and experiences, and the old shell, with its own applications. You can even run both environments, Metro and the desktop, side by side in very limited ways, as you’ll see later in this chapter.
Regardless of which version of Windows you’re talking about, the shell is both the look and feel of this OS— the user interface or experience—and the part of Windows that controls how things look and work. It is responsible for the controls—buttons, windows, tabs, and so on—that make up the environment as well as their behaviors.
Replacing the Windows shell is a big step, and this fact alone should signal that Windows 8 is a major release of the operating system since, after all, the last time Microsoft swapped out the shell was in 1995. But we’re making the case that Windows 8 represents the biggest change to Windows in the history of the product line. And that’s because Microsoft is not only swapping out the shell, but it’s also swapping out the underpinnings of Windows, or the runtime engine, as well as the APIs that developers use to write Windows apps. And this is the first time in history that the company has ever done all of that in a single release.
