Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Mouse-based Charms access also works from the top-right corner of the screen. But when the transparent preview of the Charms appears, you must move down the right edge of the screen to fully activate the Charms bar.

To fully enable the Charms, move up the right side of the screen. The Charms bar will appear normally and you can access the various options normally.

This is perhaps the simplest way to enable the Charms, and if you remember just one Windows 8 keyboard shortcut, this should be it.

• Keyboard:To enable the Charms bar from the keyboard, type Winkey + C.

• Touch:With a multi-touch display, you can swipe in from the right edge of the screen to enable the Charms bar.

Why is the Charms preview shown here? Microsoft realized that many users would move the mouse cursor near the right edge of the screen for a variety of reasons, such as to access the Peek functionality or to click an application’s scroll bar. So the Charms bar appears in preview mode first. If the user doesn’t move the mouse cursor along the right edge of the screen when this preview appears, the Charms will disappear and you can continue doing whatever it is you were doing.

Once you’ve displayed the Charms bar, you can then access the various Charms and perform system-wide or context-sensitive actions. Some of the more common actions you may access from this interface include Settings, Search—by which you can find desktop applications (as well as Metro apps and PC Settings and Control Panels)—and Devices, which helps you interact with various hardware devices, including secondary displays, removable storage devices like hard drives and USB memory devices, and the like. These functions are all discussed later in this chapter.

Of the remaining two Charms, one, Share, does not work with the desktop or Windows applications at all. Instead, the Share charm is aimed solely at Metro-style apps, which use this system capability to share information with other apps. The other remaining Charm, the Start icon, can be used as a toggle for the Start screen.

How you access these Charms varies by input device. With the mouse, you simply navigate the mouse cursor to the appropriate Charm and click it once. Via touch, it’s a simple tap. And if you access the Charms bar from the keyboard, you can use the arrow keys to navigate around and then press Enter (or Space) to activate a Charm.

While Windows 8 offers the same Screen Resolution and Personalize context menus from the desktop as did its predecessor, Windows 7, Windows 8 also expands on this notion of desktop settings by making some of these features available via a handy new Metro-based Settings interface as well. This feature is accessed via the Charms bar, as noted previously. But if you’re a keyboard maven, you can also access Settings from the desktop (or from any Metro-style experience) more quickly by tapping Winkey + I.

However you choose to enable it, the Settings pane for the desktop should resemble Figure 4-16.

Figure 4-16:The Settings user experience

The following options are available:

You can also access Control Panel from the power user tasks menu that appears when you mouse into the lower-left corner of the screen to display the Start tip and right-click.

• Control Panel:Opens the classic Control Panel interface, which is largely unchanged from Windows 7. Note that many—but not all—system configuration options can now be accessed from the new Metro-style PC Settings interface instead. This interface is described in Chapters 3 and 5, the latter of which concerns system customization.

You can also access Personalization by right-clicking on a blank area of the desktop and choosing Personalization from the context menu that appears.

• Personalization:Opens the Personalization control panel, which works much like the version from Windows 7, while offering a few new or different options, some as a result of the move away from Aero on the desktop. We discuss this interface in Chapter 5.

• PC Info:This opens the System control panel, which is also largely unchanged since Windows 7. From this interface, you can access your PC’s Windows Experience Index score, Device Manager, Remote Settings, System Protection, Advanced System Settings, and other useful configurations.

You can access Windows Help and Support more quickly by pressing F1 from anywhere in the desktop user interface.

• Help:This option launches Windows Help and Support, Microsoft’s attempt at in-product documentation. They try.

While the top part of the Settings pane is context-sensitive and will change depending on what you’re viewing on-screen, this interface is also a system-wide interface. So the Settings pane also provides various system settings, which always appear near the bottom of the pane. We discuss these settings in Chapter 3.

Windows 8 supports new kinds of system and app notifications, both of which work consistently in the Metro and desktop environments. And, as we’re sure you must suspect by now, these notifications are of course Metro-based experiences. So they appear as an overlay of sorts over the screen, whether you’re looking at the Start screen, a Metro-style app, or, yes, the desktop.

The new Windows 8 notifications are also discussed in Chapter 3—along with a ton of other Metro user experiences—but let’s see how they interact with the desktop. There are two key notification types to consider: Full-screen, modal notifications and notification toasts , small floating windows that don’t prevent you from getting other work done.

Okay, they’re not technically modal in that you can, in fact, interact with the underlying screen if you really want to. But the full-screen notifications do make it hard to do so.

An example of a full-screen notification is shown in Figure 4-17. These notifications are modal in the sense that they must be addressed before you can move on. You’ll see this type of notification when something important happens, such as when the new SmartScreen security feature suspects you’re downloading a malicious file and wants you to think twice before proceeding.

Figure 4-17:A full-screen notification

Notification toasts are far more subtle. They appear as small floating windows near the top right of the screen, as shown in Figure 4-18. If you don’t address this kind of notification, it will simply disappear.

Figure 4-18:A notification toast

Notification toasts appear for all kinds of reasons, including when you install a new application that can change file associations, when you plug in a USB-based storage device, and so on. Also, many Metro-style apps, like Mail, Calendar, and Messaging, utilize these types of notifications. For example, Mail can be configured to notify you each time a new e-mail arrives.