Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

To trigger the Start experience with the mouse, move the mouse cursor down into the lower-left corner of the screen, into the area where the Start button used to be.

You can simply push that cursor right into the corner, since Windows will stop it from moving beyond the edges of the physical display, even on multi-monitor setups.

As you hit the lower-left corner of the screen with the mouse cursor, something new happens: A Start tip appears, providing a visual thumbnail of the Start screen as an indication of what will happen if you click it. This can be seen in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3:The new Start tip appears when you mouse into the lower-left corner of the screen.

Power users will want to right-click the tip. When they do, they’ll see the magical power user menu shown in Figure 4-4. Winkey + X will also trigger this menu.

To navigate to the Start screen, simply click the Start tip. (To get back, you’ll need to do one of the following: Click the Desktop tile on the Start screen, press the Windows key on your keyboard, or tap the Windows key button on your Windows device.)

Figure 4-4:A hidden power user menu can be found by right-clicking the Start tip.

To trigger this edge UI with a multi-touch-based device, you can choose between two different edge UIs: the Switcher or the Charms bar. Both are discussed in Chapter 3, and then again later in this chapter, but since the Switcher method more closely mimics the mouse-based description above, let’s look at that quickly here.

To activate the Switcher edge UI from the desktop, swipe in from the left edge of the screen, and when the previous app thumbnail appears, swipe back to the left. If you do it just right, the Switcher appears, as in Figure 4-5. Just tap the Start tip at the bottom to return to the Start screen.

Figure 4-5:Switcher can appear over the desktop, too.

In case it’s not obvious, all of these methods for accessing the new Start experience from the desktop work like a toggle. So when you’re on the desktop and engage it, using any available method, you will navigate to the Start screen. But if you immediately repeat that step, without launching any other apps, you’ll navigate back to the desktop.

Where the Start button disappearing act will no doubt cause much wailing and pontificating, few will cry for Aero Peek, which is also missing, seemingly, in Windows 8. But as with the Start button, rumors of Aero Peek’s death are exaggerated. Although the small UI button that used to trigger this effect is gone, the Peek lives on.

To trigger Peek, you can employ one of the following methods:

• Keyboard:Press Winkey + , (comma)

• Mouse:Move the mouse cursor into the very lower-right corner of the screen.

There’s no way to trigger Peek via touch.

Either way, the effect is the same, and you will visually peek through to the desktop, so that any floating windows that were on-screen will disappear temporarily, replaced by the outlines shown in Figure 4-6.

If you press Winkey + D from the Start screen or from any Metro-style app, you will navigate to the desktop, sans the Peek effect.

Beyond the Start button and Peek, much of what you’ll see initially on the Windows desktop is identical, or nearly so, to the Windows 7 desktop. But with this being a new OS, there are indeed numerous other changes to discover. To find them, all you need to do is move the mouse around a bit or start clicking on things.

Or simply read on.

Figure 4-6:With Peek, you can peek under any windows and see the desktop and the icons it contains.

You can also right-click on the Peek area to display a context menu that provides an additional choice, Show Desktop. This option minimizes all onscreen desktop windows so you can actually access the icons on the desktop if you’d like, and not just view them as you do with Peek.

While many users of traditional PCs—desktops, laptops, and other devices without touch screens—are likely wondering what good the Metro user experiences are to them, especially if they’re committed to using old-school Windows applications like Office or Photoshop, it’s worth remembering that Metro is, in fact, the underlying operating system and that it pervades (some might say invades ) the desktop environment as well. So Metro isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Indeed, even those firmly committed to the desktop will find themselves dealing with Metro experiences throughout the day.

This isn’t as bad as it may seem. These experiences work just as well with your keyboard and mouse as they do with touch screens, for example, and they provide a fairly gentle way for recalcitrant desktop holdouts to dip their toes into the Metro waters, so to speak. As a result, these users become acclimated to the new way of doing things, and then perhaps make a future Windows tablet or other touch-based device purchase not just doable but even preferable.

Remember, these Metro features are discussed further in Chapter 3.

OK, no promises. But you need to know how this stuff works, and at the very least, becoming proficient—and thus more efficient—with Metro is a key step toward mastering Windows 8.

The Back stack does not replace existing multitasking actions, such as using the Windows Flip (Alt + Tab) keyboard shortcut or the new Switcher interface, which is described shortly.

As part of the simplified multitasking model in Windows 8, users can access a smartphone-like Back experience (or Back stack) that provides a quick way to return to the most recently used app. And yes, this is part of the reason we describe the desktop as if it were an app (even though, technically, it’s a bit more nuanced than that: The entire desktop is placed in the Back stack, not any of its individual Windows applications.

You can access the most recently used Metro app in the Back stack in the following manner:

• Mouse:Move the cursor to the top-left corner of the screen. A Back tip, in thumbnail form, will appear as shown in Figure 4-7, indicating the most recently used app. Click it to navigate to that app.

Figure 4-7:The Back tip is a thumbnail that indicates the previously used app in the Back stack.

You can right-click the Back tip to see other options related to snapping applications in a side-by-side display, which is described shortly.

You can swipe repeatedly to quickly navigate through every app in the Back stack.

• Touch:Swipe in from the left edge of the screen to navigate immediately to the previous app.

• Keyboard:You can’t directly access Back using the keyboard, but you can still use Windows Flip (Alt + Tab) or the new Switcher interface (Winkey + Tab), described shortly, to access recently used apps.