Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

• Emoticons:This opens a pane with a surprisingly diverse and voluminous collection of high-resolution emoticons across categories like people, activities, food and things, travel, nature, and symbols. As you can see in Figure 8-25, this pane slides in from the left side of the screen and stays open so you can add multiple emoticons if needed.

Figure 8-25:An amazing array of emoticons

• More:This button triggers a pop-up menu with more choices, including Bulleted list, Numbered list, Undo, and Redo.

As with the People app, you search your e-mail using the system-wide Search capability, or contract. Put more succinctly, you search for content in the Mail app. This works as it does everywhere else in Metro: Just type Winkey + Q from within the Mail app, or do so from anywhere in the system and then choose Mail from the list of apps on the right. This displays the standard Search pane.

Now, just type in a search term. This can be part of an e-mail message or subject line, or the name of a person who has sent you e-mail (or received e-mail from you). When you tap Enter, the search results appear within the Message pane of the currently selected account in the Mail app, as shown in Figure 8-26.

Figure 8-26:Search for e-mail from anywhere in Windows 8.

Note that Search provides a history list of previously performed searches, and that this history is app-specific. So when you search from Mail, this Mail-specific history list appears below the Search box so you can re-do the search at any time.

Aside from the accounts settings discussed previously, the Mail app offers only a handful of other interesting configuration choices. You can configure the following features through the Permissions choice in this pane:

Note, however, that when this is enabled, you can still determine whether each account triggers these notifications individually. (You do so through the settings for each account.)

• Notifications:This toggle determines on an app-wide basis whether Mail can trigger “toast”-style notifications every time a new e-mail arrives.

• Lock screen:By default, the Windows 8 lock screen will provide a simple Mail icon with a number indicating how many new, unread e-mails are available. (It is similar to the behavior in Windows Phone, actually.) For this feature to work, of course, Mail has to be running in the background. And if you’d prefer for that not to happen, you can disable it here.

You can configure which of the available lock screen icon spots is used by Mail by visiting PC Settings, Personalize, Lock screen. We discuss this and other personalization features in Chapter 5 Summary While Windows 8 provides most of the same customization and personalization functionality from previous Windows versions, it also includes new capabilities. These extend from the expected Metro-based enhancements to new desktop customization features and, perhaps most interestingly, some features that make the Metro and desktop environments work better together. Now that you understand the basics of using both of these environments, and how to meld them to your needs, it’s time to learn more about the Metro apps that make Windows 8 so special. .

As with other Metro apps, Mail supports the Metro Snap view, by which you can dock, or snap, the app to the left or right side of the screen and use it alongside another Metro-style app or the Windows desktop. Frankly, it’s not horrible when you consider the amount of information this app displays normally. But because of the thin, 320-pixel-wide area afforded to snap apps, Mail can only show a single pane at a time in this view. You can see this effect in Figure 8-27.

Figure 8-27:Mail in snapped view

You can navigate between the Accounts, Messages, and Reading pane views, though many e-mail messages are difficult, if not impossible, to read in this view because of the horizontal space limitations. The best reason to consider snapping Mail is for those times when you’re working in another app, or on the desktop, but you want to keep an eye on Mail for some reason. When the e-mail you want does arrive, you can simply unsnap the app and view it full screen instead.

Microsoft provides several excellent calendaring services through its Hotmail and Exchange technologies, with the latter surfacing not just in traditional, enterprise-based versions of Exchange Server but also in the far more affordable and accessible Office 365 service. Powering these services on the back end is a Microsoft technology called Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), which provides push-based support for e-mail, contacts, tasks, and, yes, calendaring. EAS is a de facto industry standard, it’s used even by Microsoft competitors such as Apple and Google, and it’s at the heart of Microsoft’s new Calendar app.

Like the Windows Phone app on which it is based, Calendar is a connected calendar, one that is designed to work in concert with one or more online calendars, in this case calendars that are provided using EAS technologies. So it works with Microsoft calendars such as Hotmail Calendar and Exchange/Office 365, of course, but also calendars from other companies, such as Google Calendar.

If you set up Windows 8 to sign in with a Microsoft account as we recommended early on in the book (and you did, right?), then you already have a Hotmail Calendar. And that calendar is automatically available through the Calendar app. You can, of course, configure other calendars as well.

Calendar offers a simple, full-screen, Metro-style interface. The default display, shown in Figure 8-28, provides a look at your schedule using a month view.

To see more options, as always, you right-click any empty space on the screen (or, with touch, swipe toward the middle of the screen from the top or bottom edge of the screen). When you do so, Calendar’s app bar appears as shown in Figure 8-29.

Figure 8-28:Calendar app

The Day, Week, and Month app bar buttons are used to change the view. For example, the week view will resemble Figure 8-30.

Figure 8-29:Calendar’s app bar

Figure 8-30:Calendar’s week view

You can also navigate through your schedule using browser-like “back” and “forward” commands. To move back or forward in time through your schedule, you can swipe the screen in either direction or use the Internet Explorer-like keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow (for back and forward, respectively). Or, when you move the mouse around on-screen, you’ll see small navigational arrows appear near the top left and top right of the screen. Click one to navigate in either direction.