Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Two additional commands are available via the snapped Calendar’s app bar: Go to today in the calendar and Add a new event. When you choose the latter, you get the nice snapped version of the new event screen shown in Figure 8-36.

Figure 8-36:The new event view, snapped

Because of the nature of the Calendar app and the underlying calendar services it utilizes, this is a very interesting example of where the Windows 8 integration strategy makes a lot of sense. That is, while you can absolutely open the Calendar app to view your events and manage your schedule, oftentimes you simply won’t need to. And that’s because the Calendar app is very deeply integrated into Windows 8.

In the previous section, we discussed how the Calendar app can provide notifications that alert you to pending events no matter where you are in the system—Start screen, Metro-style app, or the Windows desktop—or what you’re doing. But Calendar also provides at-a-glance calendaring information in other key places in the Windows 8 user interface, such as the Lock and Start screens.

The expressive new Windows 8 lock screen provides a ton of useful information at a glance, including the date and time, the number of pending e-mails, your network connectivity, and so on. But Calendar is awarded a special capability on the lock screen: When configured properly, you can see the title, location, and duration of your next event, as shown in Figure 8-37.

Let’s review the three configuration interfaces you could access to change this behavior.

The first is the Calendar settings pane. If you access this interface (easiest way: Winkey + I from within the app) and click Permissions, you’ll see an option there that allows this app to run in the background and display information on the lock screen. This option must be set to On for this functionality to work.

Figure 8-37:Calendar event information on the lock screen

The second place is in PC Settings, the new Metro-style control panel. If you access this interface (Winkey + C, Settings, More PC settings) and navigate to Personalize, Lock screen, as shown in Figure 8-38, you will see some pertinent settings for Calendar.

Figure 8-38:In PC Settings, you can configure how Calendar works with the lock screen.

Under the Lock screen apps area, you’ll see that Windows 8 allows you to configure up to seven Metro-style apps that can run in the background and provide quick status and notifications. But below that is a very interesting option: You can configure a single app to display detailed status information. If Calendar isn’t chosen here, click the “+” icon and choose Calendar from the pop-up list.

If you’re still not seeing Calendar events on the lock screen, there’s one last place to check. In PC Settings, navigate to Notifications and then ensure that the option Show app notifications on the lock screen is set to On.

Windows 8 offers far too many ways to customize the system, but we cover this functionality 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. if you can’t get enough.

If you’re using the Start screen as a dashboard of sorts, you know that most Metro-style apps provide live tiles that provide ongoing, app-related updates. In the case of Calendar, this functionality is quite useful, as the app’s live tile will animate through the day’s pending events as you watch. The Calendar live tile, shown in Figure 8-39, is quite expressive.

Figure 8-39:The Calendar live tile

Of course, if you misconfigure things, the live tile could be very static. But you can check the live tile properties easily enough to make sure it’s configured to your liking. To do so, right-click the Calendar live tile and consider the commands that appear in the app bar at the bottom of the screen, as in Figure 8-40.

Figure 8-40:The Calendar live tile settings

• Unpin from Start:Here, you can remove the Calendar live tile if you don’t wish to use it anymore.

• Uninstall:This option lets you uninstall Calendar.

• Smaller/Larger:Calendar can only display live updates when it’s set to the larger (rectangular) tile size. If you set it to the smaller (square) size, it will simply animate between static displays.

• Turn live tile off/on:You can use this command to toggle whether live updates appear on the tile’s surface. By default, this is set to on.

If you’re familiar with Windows Phone, you know that Microsoft’s smartphone platform sports an excellent unified messaging client called—wait for it—Messaging that lets you communicate with others via services such as SMS, MMS, Windows Live Messenger, and Facebook, all via a single interface. That Messaging client uses color-coded threads to differentiate between conversations you have, regardless of the service used, and you can switch back and forth between the available services depending on which services your contacts use as well. It’s a nice little app that integrates well with the underlying OS, popping-up notification toasts if you’re doing something else and a new message arrives.

SMS stands for Short Message Service and is used for text messaging, while MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and can be used for sharing video, photos, and other multimedia content.

The Messaging app for Windows 8 works in much the same way, though there are some key differences between the two. The biggest is that the Messaging app for Windows 8 does not support cell phone/smartphone services such as SMS and MMS, since these occur over carrier networks and almost always incur additional fees.

Though these the two apps work similarly, those who are familiar with Windows Live Messenger for Windows might consider Messaging to be its Metro-styled equivalent, or even replacement. That’s because Messaging works with the same basic two services as does Windows Live Messenger: Windows Live and Facebook.

Messaging provides a simple, full-screen interface like that shown in Figure 8-41.

On the left, you will find a Threads pane that contains the various threads, or conversations, you have (or are currently having) with others. Each contact will have their own thread, so each time you communicate with the same person, the new conversations will be appended to the previous ones.