Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Figure 8-13:The What’s new view provides a way to easily keep up with your friends and other contacts’ activities.

Figure 8-14:A contact’s post shown in all its full-screen glory

Then, tap the Add a comment box on the bottom to add a comment. You can optionally click a Like, Favorite, or Retweet button if available, again depending on the account to which the post was made.

In addition to your contacts and their aggregated activities view, People provides a handy front end for managing your own digital persona, or the online account or accounts that establish you as an entity that can perform tasks and establish relationships with others. Called Me and shown in Figure 8-15, this interface is to you as the What’s new view is to others, a look at what’s going on… with you.

Figure 8-15:The Me view is all about you.

In this view, you can see and edit your own contact information via the View profile link, view your own What’s new feed, which is culled from whatever online accounts you’ve configured, view and deal with pending notifications, and view the photos you’ve recently posted to social networks and other accounts.

Most important, perhaps, you can also use this interface to post to supported social networks. If you have more than one configured, you’ll see a drop-down letting you choose the service you want to use, and a text box labeled “What’s on your mind?” where you can type in your new post.

It’s perhaps surprising that the Windows 8 Mail app is a big-screen version of the mobile Mail app that first debuted in Windows Phone, providing access to multiple e-mail accounts using an interface that’s optimized for bigger, touch-enabled screens. It utilizes common e-mail features like attachments, CC and BCC support, and the reading of textual and graphical e-mails. It also works in either portrait or horizontal display modes, so you can manage mail the way you want to.

Mail provides a three-pane view, as shown in Figure 8-16, where you can see the major elements of the app’s primary user interface.

Figure 8-16:The Mail app

These elements include:

• Accounts pane:This leftmost pane provides access to each configured account and to the e-mail folders contained within each. (Only the folders for the currently selected account are shown.) The number of unread messages will appear next to the Inbox folder heading. Or, if you have multiple accounts, next to the link for that account. In Figure 8-17, you can see the accounts pane in Mail as it looks configured for three different accounts.

Figure 8-17:Multiple accounts in Mail

To select multiple messages, right-click them in turn in the Mailbox folder pane. Once the messages you want are selected, you can apply actions such as Mark as Read, Mark as Unread, Move, and Delete to them. These all occur through Mail’s app bar.

• Messages pane:Displays the contents of the current folder in the currently selected e-mail account. (The default is Inbox.)

• Reading pane:Displays the currently selected e-mail message.

• New:Click to create a new e-mail message.

• Respond:Click to reply, reply to all, or forward the currently selected e-mail message.

• Delete:Click to delete the currently selected e-mail message.

If you display Mail’s app bar, you will reveal several other commands, including:

• Sync:Click this button to manually check for new e-mail messages at each configured account.

• Pin to Start:Click to pin the current mail folder view to the Start screen for fast access. This works much as it does for contacts in the People app: You can rename the tile as desired, and it will appear at the right end of the Start screen when first created.

• Move:Click this button to move the selected message to a new folder. When clicked, the Folders view will temporarily appear—with the rest of the app grayed out—so you can pick a new location for the message.

• Mark as read/Mark as unread:This button toggles the “read” state of the selected message. By default, a message is marked as read when it is selected.

Mail is a modern and fairly efficient e-mail solution, but as a mobile app it’s missing a few typical features one might be expecting. Key among these, perhaps, is the ability to drag and drop, such as you might do to move messages from one folder to another: This capability simply doesn’t exist in Mail, and if you’re used to managing mail in, say, Windows Live Mail, Outlook, or even web-based solutions like Hotmail or Office 365, it takes some getting used to. Remember: Metro-style apps work like—are, in fact—mobile apps, so they follow some usage patterns that may seem out of place on a full-featured PC.

While Windows 8 supports numerous account types as explained in the previous section about the People app, only a few of them—Hotmail, Google, and Exchange (which handles Exchange Server, Office 365, many other Exchange ActiveSync-based account types), and IMAP—provide e-mail support that works with the Mail app. Put another way, the Mail app functions much like a mobile device mail application and not like a full-featured desktop application such as Outlook. It’s basically just an EAS e-mail app—Hotmail and Google use EAS behind the scenes to sync with mobile devices—though to be fair, it’s more accurately described as a connected mail app, since it does also work with IMAP-based e-mail accounts too.

This design has its pros and cons, but the end result is that Mail, like Windows 8, is forward leaning, and not all that concerned with legacy e-mail solutions based on out-of-date technologies like POP3. If you need that kind of support, you will have to look elsewhere.

The first time you use Mail, you’ll see a little box in the bottom of the Accounts pane that explains how you add accounts and provides a link for doing so. But you can add accounts at any time by visiting the Settings pane, as with other Metro apps. To display that pane, press Winkey + I, or find it via the Charms bar, and then click Accounts. You will see a display much like that in Figure 8-18, listing the accounts you’ve already configured.

Figure 8-18:Mail accounts settings

To add a new account, click Add an account. Then, in the next screen, choose among the available account types; Hotmail, Google, Exchange, or Other Account. Account creation occurs as it does in the People app, via a full-screen Metro-style notification like the one in Figure 8-19.