Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Once you’ve used Windows Store for a while, or across a few PCs and devices, you may find it useful to view all of the apps you’ve downloaded and purchased. You can do this through the Your apps interface. To find this, display the Windows Store app bar and choose Your apps. After a bit of thinking, you’ll see a display much like that in Figure 6-26.

Figure 6-26:The Your apps interface provides a handy front end to, well, your apps.

As with other areas of Windows Store, you can filter this view, in this case in two unique ways. You can view all of the apps you’ve downloaded or just the ones you downloaded on a particular PC. And you can sort by apps that aren’t installed on the current PC, by date, or by name.

Want to install all of your apps? Just click the Select all button in the bottom left of the screen and then click Install.

To install an app, simply select it and then click the Install button that appears in the app bar at the bottom of the screen as in Figure 6-27. You can also click View details to learn more about a selected app.

Thanks to regulatory and antitrust-related agreements around the world, Microsoft is no longer free to bundle as many useful applications (or, in this case, apps) with Windows as it did in the past. For this reason, Windows 7 was often accompanied on new PC installs by related products like Windows Live Essentials and Zune that Microsoft said completed the Windows 7 experience. These applications didn’t technically come with Windows, but they were available separately, for free, and PC makers were free to bundle the apps on their PCs alongside Windows. So the net effect for most users was the same as if Microsoft had included them in Windows 7.

Figure 6-27:Installing apps from Your apps

Windows 8 faces similar scrutiny. So there are numerous Microsoft apps in this release that are not technically included with Windows 8. And though most PC makers are bundling them with Windows 8 as before, completing (or muddying, others would say) the experience, so to speak, many users will also acquire Windows on their own.

As discussed at the beginning of this book, we consider these apps to be a key part of the full, or complete, Windows 8 experience. The good news is that they’re readily available from Windows Store. And all of them are free. So if they’re not available in your copy of Windows 8 for some reason, you can find them here.

The app categories and the apps that fall within each are listed below:

• Communications apps:These include Calendar, Mail, Maps, Messaging, People, Reader, and SkyDrive, or what we call the productivity apps.

• Entertainment apps:Camera, Photos, Xbox Companion, Xbox Music, Xbox Video, and Xbox Games.

• Bing apps:Bing, Finance, News, Sports, Travel, and Weather.

Not surprisingly, this book assumes you have these apps installed, so if any aren’t present on your PC, get cracking.

Microsoft’s communications (productivity) apps are covered in Chapter 8. Microsoft’s entertainment apps are discussed in Chapter 9.

As you download and install apps, you may find yourself relying on the in-store reviews and ratings that other users have provided. And as you spend more time reading these often useful bits of feedback, you’ll discover that you can optionally leave different types of feedback of your own, if you’d like and depending on what you’re comfortable with.

Windows Store supports different types of feedback, listed here from simple and fast to more involved.

As you read an individual review, you may feel that it was particularly helpful… or not. And in a nice bit of fair play—where the hunter becomes the hunted—you can review a review, so to speak. That is, you can indicate whether a review was helpful in getting you to decide whether to download or buy it.

To leave this kind of feedback, find the Was this review helpful? link that appears below each review, as shown in Figure 6-28. Simply click Yes or No to indicate your choice.

Figure 6-28:You can rate a review!

As more and more people rate reviews, these choices become very important as they indicate the relative trustworthiness of each review. If 19 out of 20 people found a review helpful, for example, chances are it’s pretty good.

Sometimes a review is so terrible it warrants special attention. Perhaps the author uses foul language or is complaining about something that has nothing to do with the actual app (a long-running pet peeve of ours). If so, you can report the review and a real, live human being at Microsoft will take a look. If they agree with you, the review could be removed from the store.

However, be careful when doing so: There’s no confirmation and no chance to change your mind.

To report an app, click the Report this review link.

If you’re interested in opining on the quality of an app—for better or worse—you can write a review of your own. Reviews have a few components: a rating, which can go from 1 to 5 stars, a title, and then the review itself.

You will need to have first installed the app for the Write a review link to appear. Obviously.

To write a review from within Windows Store, visit the app’s landing page and click the Write a review link you’ll see in the colored pane on the left side of the Overview view. In the next screen, shown in Figure 6-29, you’re provided with stars for the rating and fields for a title and the review body.

Figure 6-29:Windows Store app review form

Once you’ve written a review, the Write a review link on the app’s landing page will change to Update your review.

Note that you are accountable for the reviews you write: The name and picture associated with your Microsoft account will accompany the review, for all the world to see. But with awesome responsibility comes awesome power: Your rating will impact the overall rating of the app, and your review is now open to the plaudits—or criticisms—of your fellow Windows 8 users.

If you’re familiar with the horrific and unreliable method for uninstalling traditional Windows desktop-based applications, which in many cases does nothing to remove spurious files and registry entries, you’ll be delighted to discover that uninstalling a Metro-style app is simplicity itself. Most surprisingly, perhaps, you uninstall these apps from the Start screen.

To uninstall an app, navigate to the Start screen and locate the tile for that app. If it’s not present, you can use the Windows 8 All Apps list, or Start search to locate the app. Here’s how:

• All Apps:From the Start screen, open the app bar. This can be done by swiping in from the top or bottom edge of the screen, by pressing Winkey + Z, or by right-clicking an empty area of the Start screen with the mouse. Then, select All apps from the app bar and locate the app you want to remove from the list.