you’ll see an Options pane like that in Figure 8-34.
Figure 8-34: Calendar Options.
Here, you can determine on a calendar-by-calendar basis whether to display that calendar’s events in Calendar and what color you wish to use to display that calendar. Note that calendar sources with multiple calendars will show an entry for each calendar.
Snapping Calendar
Like other Metro-style apps, Calendar supports the Metro Snap capability, so you can snap it in a subordinate position on-screen next to another Metro-style app or the Windows desktop. Unlike some Metro-style apps, however, Calendar works quite well in this arrangement, providing a customized layout that matches the thin area provided quite nicely.
As you can see in Figure 8-35, the snapped Calendar app provides a thumbnail view of the month as well as any events that are occurring today. You can also click other days in the month view to see the events for those days.
Figure 8-35: Calendar snapped next to the desktop
You can always type Ctrl + T to “go to today” in Calendar, whether it’s in snapped view or the normal full- screen mode. Ctrl + N works in snapped view, too, for creating a new event.
Two additional commands are available via the snapped Calendar’s app bar: Go to today in the calendar and Add a new event. When you choose the latter, you get the nice snapped version of the new event screen shown in Figure 8-36.
Figure 8-36: The new event view, snapped
Lock Screen and Live Tile Use
Because of the nature of the Calendar app and the underlying calendar services it utilizes, this is a very interesting example of where the Windows 8 integration strategy makes a lot of sense. That is, while you can absolutely open the Calendar app to view your events and manage your schedule, oftentimes you simply won’t need to. And that’s because the Calendar app is very deeply integrated into Windows 8.
In the previous section, we discussed how the Calendar app can provide notifications that alert you to pending events no matter where you are in the system—Start screen, Metro-style app, or the Windows desktop—or what you’re doing. But Calendar also provides at-a-glance calendaring information in other key places in the Windows 8 user interface, such as the Lock and Start screens.
The expressive new Windows 8 lock screen provides a ton of useful information at a glance, including the date and time, the number of pending e-mails, your network connectivity, and so on. But Calendar is awarded a special capability on the lock screen: When configured properly, you can see the title, location, and duration of your next event, as shown in Figure 8-37.
Let’s review the three configuration interfaces you could access to change this behavior.
The first is the Calendar settings pane. If you access this interface (easiest way: Winkey + I from within the app) and click Permissions, you’ll see an option there that allows this app to run in the background and display information on the lock screen. This option must be set to On for this functionality to work.
Figure 8-37: Calendar event information on the lock screen
The second place is in PC Settings, the new Metro-style control panel. If you access this interface (Winkey + C, Settings, More PC settings) and navigate to Personalize, Lock screen, as shown in Figure 8-38, you will see some pertinent settings for Calendar.
Figure 8-38: In PC Settings, you can configure how Calendar works with the lock screen.
Under the Lock screen apps area, you’ll see that Windows 8 allows you to configure up to seven Metro-style apps that can run in the background and provide quick status and notifications. But below that is a very interesting option: You can configure a single app to display detailed status information. If Calendar isn’t chosen here, click the “+” icon and choose Calendar from the pop-up list.
If you’re
Windows 8 offers far too many ways to customize the system, but we cover this functionality in Chapter 5 if you can’t get enough.
If you’re using the Start screen as a dashboard of sorts, you know that most Metro-style apps provide live tiles that provide ongoing, app-related updates. In the case of Calendar, this functionality is quite useful, as the app’s live tile will animate through the day’s pending events as you watch. The Calendar live tile, shown in Figure 8 -39, is quite expressive.
Figure 8-39: The Calendar live tile
Of course, if you misconfigure things, the live tile could be very static. But you can check the live tile properties easily enough to make sure it’s configured to your liking. To do so, right-click the Calendar live tile and consider the commands that appear in the app bar at the bottom of the screen, as in Figure 8-40.
Figure 8-40: The Calendar live tile settings
• Unpin from Start: Here, you can remove the Calendar live tile if you don’t wish to use it anymore.
• Uninstall: This option lets you uninstall Calendar.
• Smaller/Larger: Calendar can only display live updates when it’s set to the larger (rectangular) tile size. If you set it to the smaller (square) size, it will simply animate between static displays.
• Turn live tile off/on: You can use this command to toggle whether live updates appear on the tile’s surface. By default, this is set to on.
Messaging
If you’re familiar with Windows Phone, you know that Microsoft’s smartphone platform sports an excellent unified messaging client called—wait for it—Messaging that lets you communicate with others via services such as
