Welcome to Windows 8

Well, Windows 8 has been released in all of it's 'until recently named' Metro tile glory and it's time to learn how to do some simple things with it. While personally I find it's combination of interfaces cumbersome and klugey (highly technical word there) it does have some positives and seeing as how this is the path that Microsoft has decided upon for all further Operating Systems, it's a good idea to learn how to use some of it.

The New Start Menu

The new start menu is full screen and packed with potential. There are a number of concepts here that it's important we touch on, but first, here's mine.

Other than being completely different from Windows XP/Vista/7, you'll notice a few things right off the bat.

• Full Screen - Probably the most jarring difference, the Start Menu now gets a full screen.
• Live Tiles - Those boxes are called Tiles. Some of them live update or scroll information about their connected Application
• Two Tile Sizes - Big or Small. Smaller ones don't show as much info, but also don't take up as much room.
• Grouped and Named Sections - You can move Tiles into their own categories, naming those categories for the organizer in all of us.
• Custom Backgrounds - You can change the background to one of many included or make your own!

A Deep Dive into Tiles

Before we start manipulating the Tiles, let's give 'em a look. You'll notice a number of pre-installed Microsoft Verticals (to use marketing jargon) in my Start menu. First, in the top left you see an e-mail from Audible (Not making an ad, just an e-mail I've received). That's actually the title and beginning of the content of the e-mail. This is the Hotmail Tile. It scrolls through all the unread messages I've got and updates periodically in the background. Click there and it opens up the Mail App, which is sorta like Outlook.com. Under it is the Calendar (which updates daily, but also includes info on calendar entries where appropriate). I made it a small Tile because I don't use much in the way of entries other than needing to know the date. People is a connection to my contacts. Messaging is Microsoft MSN Messenger. RUSSELL 2000 is the Stock App, etc, etc... I kinda threw them all together as they came pre-installed.

You'll see there's a gap to the right of the first two columns. There's then 2 large and 4 small tiles, another gap and then a section of 10 Tiles. Looking above the 10 there's a Title "Programming". Okay, so maybe Google in IE isn't a Programming App. Maybe we should fix that. In fact, I have Google Chrome on here with Google set to my default, so I don't need that second Tile anymore. Right click on any tile and it adds a check mark and a bright blue border. It also brings up a menu on the bottom of the screen. If you look on that menu, you can see that "Unpin from Start" is an option. Clicking that removes the short cut.

Why is that called "unpin" and not "delete", you ask? Well, the Start Menu doesn't really HOLD anything per-se. It's more like a bulletin board you 'pin' your favorite links to.

Manipulation

Let's continue with the Start Menu Manipulation! As you're clearing out some things you don't want, you may notice that certain Tiles have different options on the bottom bar. Some things have "Larger" or "Smaller", this triggers between the two different sized Tiles. Some things have "Uninstall"! Be careful, while I said that things 'pin' to your Start Menu, it's smart enough to recognize that it's attached to a program that you installed. While you used to have to dig through Add/Remove Programs, you can now hit "Uninstall" and it will not only remove the link, but uninstall the program that placed it there in the first place (For instance, that "Silverlight" Icon on mine. "Uninstall" would permanently remove Silverlight from my system! ... Don't worry, there's an "Are you sure?" box popup!)

Time to move things around. If you left click and drag a Tile around, you can see that it's easy to put it in a different order, or in a different group. Try dragging it past the right most group you've got... it'll highlight a separator and dropping it will create a new group.

"But I like naming things!" you say? We can do that! if you move your mouse towards the bottom right you'll see a little box that's lighter than the background with a '-' in it... click it. What happened!? Your Start Menu shrunk! While it might seem too small to be useful, don't worry, we're not worried about reading things or launching Apps from this view, we can manipulate things and see where everything lives.

Right clicking on any group allows you to highlight it and "Name" shows up at the bottom of the screen. Choosing that allows you to name your group, simple as that. You'll also notice that highlighted or not, you can drag a group around in this view as sort of a mass reordering.

Searching

Something that's not immediately obvious here is the ability to search for things. You may have noticed that the Windows 8 right menu that you find by bumping to top right or bottom right corners with the mouse (or using the 'pull' motion to pull it out from the side with a touch pad or touch screen) has a magnifying glass on it. Clicking that pulls up a rather detailed search dialog with an overwhelming list of recent searches, recent apps, and other ones it might think you want. If you start to type, it'll narrow things down. A bit plus is that there's no need to put your cursor on the text input box. Since there's nothing else here it thinks you should ever be typing for, it assumes it's all search input.

To go along with this, simply clicking the Windows Start button on your keyboard and typing something immediately starts a search. On the right side is your query, and on the left side is what it thinks matches. You can keep typing as long as you need, or you can just type enough to make it show on the left side and use the arrow keys or mouse to select what you want from the list. Also remember you don't need to type matching the exact title. For instance, a search where I've typed "Spe" was enough to make "Windows Speech Recognition" pop to the top, and just Enter would run it! This is probably my favorite part of the start menu, and it's one that was also in Vista+, but not quite executed as smoothly or quickly as it is in 8. I think at this point you've got a fairly good grasp on how to work with the Start Menu. Next time we'll dig into basic system configuration and how this interacts with the Desktop.