Windows 8 Secrets

You can also group Start screen tiles. To create a new group, select a tile and move it to the far left or right of the current group until you see a new group bar appear as in Figure 5-13; this is your indication that dropping the tile there will create a new group.

Figure 5-13: Creating a new tile group

And when you do release the tile, you can see that it’s by itself in a new group (Figure 5-14). Now you can just move other tiles into that group as you would normally.

Figure 5-14: A lonely tile group of one

TIP

How you arrange and group tiles is of course up to you, but many people like to group them logically, with media apps (Music, Video, and so on) together in one group, productivity apps in another, and so on.

You can also move and even name groups. To do so, you need to take advantage of a cool Metro feature called semantic zoom which lets you visually zoom the entire Start screen so you can see the whole layout at once in a kind of thumbnail view.

You can enable semantic view most easily via touch or mouse. With touch, simply pinch the Start screen. As you do, the tiles will visually shrink until they’re a small group of thumbnails as in Figure 5-15.

Figure 5-15: Semantic zoom

With a mouse, move the mouse cursor in the lower-right corner of the screen and click the tiny semantic zoom button, which can be seen in Figure 5-16. This tiny button will immediately place the screen into semantic zoom view as well.

Figure 5-16: It’s easy to miss, but this button will display the Start screen with semantic zoom.

There are two basic actions you can perform in this view.

• First, you can arrange groups. To do so, simply select a group—using the same methods that are used to select an individual tile—and then drag it around the thumbnail view of the Start screen, positioning it where you want, as in Figure 5-17.

Figure 5-17: Rearranging the layout of tile groups

• Second, you can optionally name each tile group. To do this, select the group you wish to name while in semantic view—again, using the same selection technique you learned for tiles—and then tap the Name group app bar button that appears. It will provide a text box for you to type the name. And when you are done, the group name will appear over the top-left area of the group, as shown in Figure 5-18.

Figure 5-18: A named tile group

To exit semantic zoom, use the stretch gesture (a sort of “reverse pinch”) on a touch-based screen. Or, with a more traditional PC, type Esc or click on any empty spot on the screen.

Customizing Individual Start Screen Tiles

Looking at your Start screen, you’ve probably noticed that the tiles are two different sizes. There are large rectangular tiles and then smaller, square tiles. This raises a few questions, but key among them is whether it’s possible to customize individual tiles so that they are one or the other size. It depends.

Tiles that represent Metro-style apps can support both tile sizes. And most do, though it’s not a requirement. So you may occasionally run into a Metro-style app that offers only one tile size. But in either large or small variants, these tiles can optionally be live, offering app-related updates graphically or textually.

Tiles that represent websites, traditional Windows applications, or Explorer locations support only the smaller, square tile size. These types of tiles are not live: They provide the name of the app or experience only, and some icon. That’s it.

You can customize a live tile in the following ways:

• Make it bigger/smaller: A large rectangular tile can be resized to be a smaller, square tile if you’d like. Likewise, a smaller, square tile can be resized as a larger, rectangular tile. Doing so will generally impact the amount of information displayed by a live tile, though the exact change will differ from app to app, depending on how it was created. In Figure 5-19, you can see different versions of the same live tile, one large and one small.

Figure 5-19: The same tile in its two supported size configurations

• Turn live tile on/off: While some will really appreciate the constantly updating live tiles on a typical Windows 8 Start screen, others will find it distracting or even annoying. There are two things you can try to cut down on the noise if you’re in the latter group. First, you can experiment with resizing the tiles from large to small, since those smaller tiles—while still “live”—tend to be less dynamic than their larger versions. But if you just want it to stop, you can also turn off live updating on a tile-by-tile basis. And this works for large as well as small tiles. In Figure 5-20, you can see the effect this has on a typical app tile.

Figure 5-20: Same tile with live updates on (left) and off (right)

You can’t customize the color of a tile, which is designated by the app’s creator and cannot be modified. Still, some apps let you customize the tile face in some ways. For example, the Photos app lets you apply a favorite picture as the tile face.

To perform either of the preceding customizations, select the tile in question and then choose the appropriate app bar button as shown in Figure 5-21.

Figure 5-21: Tile options in the app bar

Customizing User Accounts

While we dedicate a large chunk of Chapter 12 to user accounts, it’s worth mentioning here that PC Settings is also the home for most user account customizations as well. There are two basic interfaces: one for your user account picture and then a more general Users settings area that lets you configure other aspects of your account and other user accounts. (And no, we don’t know why these two things are separate.)

Changing Your Account Picture

To change your user account picture, navigate to PC Settings, Personalize, Account picture. Or, select Change account picture from the Start screen-based user tile in the upper-right corner of that screen. Either way, you’ll be presented with the screen in Figure 5-22.

Figure 5-22: Account picture settings

Using this interface is pretty straightforward. The Browse button lets you find a picture on your PC or elsewhere using a standard Metro-style File Picker. The Camera tile lets you capture a still image using the Camera app. (And you can see other apps listed there as well, of course.)

If you sign in with a Microsoft account as we recommend, note that changing this account picture will also change the account picture associated with your online account. Likewise, if you change your Microsoft account picture elsewhere—such as on the web—it will change the image you see here in Windows 8 as well.

Changing Other Account Settings

Other settings related to your user account, and other accounts that are (or will be) configured on this PC