Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

As important, the Metro experience pervades other Windows 8 experiences, including the Windows desktop, providing charms, search, sharing, app switching, app snapping, notifications, and device interactions that work everywhere in Windows. In this way, we can see that Metro isn’t a “thing on a thing” or even a “thing next to a thing.” It’s the heart and soul of Windows 8. It is, ultimately, what makes Windows 8 so special.

• Understanding what’s changed with the Windows desktop

• How Metro experiences are exposed on the desktop

• Using the new File Explorer

• Managing files and folders

• Managing classic desktop applications

• Managing running tasks

• Using SkyDrive with the Windows desktop

While the touch-friendly Metro-style user experience is clearly the big story in Windows 8, most Windows users have a rich history with the Windows desktop and the many, many applications and utilities that have run in this environment for years. Fortunately, all of these things are still available in Windows 8, since this OS includes an updated and enhanced version of the traditional Windows desktop environment, its File Explorer file manager, and the other related capabilities Windows users know and love. And this is true whether you’re using a traditional desktop PC or laptop, or a newfangled tablet computer or hybrid PC, and whether you’re using Windows 8 or Windows RT.

There is one major exception to this rule. While Windows 8-based PCs and devices of course provide all of the desktop features you’ve come to know and love, those based on Windows RT—the ARM-based variant of Windows 8—are somewhat limited in that they cannot run any third-party Windows desktop software. That said, all of the features described in this chapter work equally well and identically in Windows RT as they do with their Intel-type Windows 8 brethren.

How the Metro-style environment and Windows desktop interact with each other is an important consideration for anyone moving to this new operating system. After all, in previous Windows versions, the Windows desktop was the entire user interface, the face that Windows presented to the world. But in Windows 8, the desktop behaves, conceptually at least, as an app that works within the new Windows Runtime (WinRT) and the Metro-style user experience. As such, even users who stick strictly to the desktop environment will still need to deal with, and understand, various Metro-style user interfaces, including the new Back and Start experiences, Switcher, and the Charms bar. And indignities of indignities, you’ll even need to use Metro to shut down your PC!

This chapter examines each of these issues as well as all of the new Windows desktop features that Microsoft added to this version of the OS. If you were expecting very little in the way of desktop enhancements thanks to a focus on the Metro environment, prepare to be surprised. There are some very nice updates to the desktop in Windows 8.

To best understand what’s new with the Windows 8 desktop, let’s take a quick look back at the Windows 7 desktop, shown in Figure 4-1. This was the default (and only) user experience in the previous version of Windows, and aside from a few minor bits that differed between various product versions, this was essentially what all Windows 7 users saw when they booted into the operating system.

The Windows 7 desktop comprises a few key items, most of which hadn’t changed at all since Windows 95. These include one or more desktop icons (with Recycle Bin being the only icon pretty much guaranteed to appear every time), an optional selection of desktop gadgets (graphical utilities that would “float” over the desktop but under any open windows; these first appeared in Windows Vista), a Start button (or Start orb, as it was officially called), a taskbar, a system tray (with white notification icons and a clock), and the Aero Peek button, which temporarily hid the on-screen windows so you could peek at the underlying desktop.

Figure 4-1:The Windows 7 desktop

The Windows 8 desktop, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn’t look all that different. As you can see in Figure 4-2, it looks almost identical to the Windows 7 desktop, though the Aero “glass” look and feel has been replaced with a flatter, more opaque, and somewhat Metro-like user experience that is battery-life friendly and a bit more consistent with the new Metro user experiences in Windows 8.

Figure 4-2:The Windows 8 desktop looks and works like its predecessor, but with some minor differences.

Look a bit closer, however, and you will notice some other differences. For the most part, these differences involve user interface elements that were present in Windows 7 but are now missing in Windows 8. What’s interesting is that the two biggest—the Start and Aero Peek—are in fact still functionally available in Windows 8, even though they’re no longer visually there.

Microsoft’s decision to remove the Start button is, perhaps, one of the more controversial decisions in Windows 8, because this on-screen button has been a ubiquitous mainstay of the Windows user interface since 1995. But before you get too upset over the change, it’s helpful to understand why it happened and how Windows 8 makes an onscreen button on the desktop superfluous anyway.

As discussed in Chapter 3, many capabilities of the old Start menu can now be found in other Metro interfaces, such as the Charms bar.

The why part is straightforward. With the addition of the Metro environment as the default user interface in Windows 8, Microsoft has replaced the application launching capabilities of the desktop-based Start menu (and, in Windows 7, the taskbar) with a new Metro-style interface called the Start screen. Microsoft calls this the new Start experience. (They do love the word experience .) And they wanted it to work equally well—and consistently—from both of Windows 8’s user interfaces, Metro and the desktop.

If you’re using an older or nonstandard keyboard that doesn’t have a Windows key, try Ctrl + Esc instead.

What this means is that every time you tap the Windows key button on your Windows device, or press the Windows key on your keyboard—while the desktop is displayed, that is—the desktop will disappear and be replaced by the new Start screen. This happens instead of the old behavior where the Start menu would display.

But what about mouse or touch users? Your muscle memory is telling you to tap the Start button. But the Start button is gone.

Or is it?

As it turns out, Windows 8 includes methods for triggering this new Start experience for both the mouse and touch. As with other system-wide actions, these new triggers are part of a collective series of edge UIs , and while we cover this topic pretty heavily in Chapter 3, this one is worth discussing here as well since they work with the desktop, too, and many users coming to Windows 8 on a traditional PC will interact with it mostly from the desktop.