Don’t confuse “connected” with “online.” Some of these apps do work when the PC is offline. But they all rely on online services, not local-only data.
If that’s the case, the first time you launch People, Mail, Calendar, or Messaging, you will be asked to sign in to your Microsoft account, as shown in Figure 8-1. There is no way to use these four apps otherwise, because they are, by nature, what we call connected apps, or apps that offer no disconnected-only experience. (Microsoft calls them communications apps.)
Figure 8-1: You will sign in to your Microsoft account. Oh yes, you will.
That is, they rely on online services in ways that are pervasive and necessary. So with People, you will not manage contacts that are local to that one PC. Instead, you will manage contacts that are stored in one or more cloud-based services. Ditto for Mail, Calendar, and Messaging. None of these apps works only with local data. (In fact, none work with local data at all.)
Microsoft first took this approach with Windows Phone back in 2010, and it was somewhat controversial at the time. Some users, familiar with local personal information stores like that provided by traditional Windows applications such as Microsoft Outlook didn’t understand the benefits of centralized, cloud-based data storage, or were perhaps suspicious of such services or unwilling to change. With Windows 8, however—and with Windows Phone 8 as well, for that matter—Microsoft has leapt firmly into this connected future. And while you’re still welcome to use old-fashioned applications that lock data to a single hard drive on a single PC, the software giant won’t help you do so with its own Metro-style apps in Windows 8.
We recognize that this will still be somewhat controversial with an increasingly smaller group of people who resist change for whatever reason. But we also believe that Microsoft’s approach with Windows 8 is correct. And having long ago adopted this cloud-based model, we’re excited to access our data from anywhere now using Windows 8. We suspect most of you are as well.
People
When you sign in to Windows 8 for the first time with a Microsoft account, a number of interesting things happen behind the scenes, including the ability to sync settings between PCs. But Windows 8 also provides this account information to apps, including the core productivity apps that one might want to use with an online account, like Mail, Calendar, Messaging, and People. That latter app, based on the People hub that appeared first in Windows Phone, is Windows 8’s new contacts management app. And it provides a nice interface for aggregating the contact lists from multiple accounts, providing a single view into them all, and thus for all the people you know and interact with each day.
The People app is shown in Figure 8-2.
Figure 8-2: The People app helps you manage your contacts.
This app is called the People hub on Windows Phone, but it looks and works similarly.
The People app also provides a nice, Metro-style view of all of the activities that your contacts are doing online, culled from the various feeds that are associated with their accounts. This can include sources such as Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter, and more, and includes the ability to comment on what others are doing.
Finally, you can also use the People app to view and edit your own online persona, which is the way other people view you out in the world.
Understanding the People App
Like all Metro-style apps, the People app is a full-screen experience with a nice layout that automatically flows according to the size and pixel density of your display. This app consists of the main view and several other views, including:
• Sociaclass="underline" A timeline-like view of your contacts’ activities across all of the connected online services.
• Me: Here, you can view and edit your own online persona.
• Notifications: A list of notifications from each of the connected online services.
• What’s new: The latest activities from across the connected activities.
You can switch to the other views by clicking (or tapping) the appropriate headings or tiles in the People app’s main view.
The People app also provides an app bar that is hidden by default. Its functionality varies by view and is described in the appropriate sections later in this chapter. But as always, this app bar can be enabled by right-clicking any on-screen empty space with the mouse, by swiping toward the center of the screen from the top or left edge, or by typing Winkey + Z.
The People app is also designed to be snapped, utilizing a new feature of the Metro environment that allows one app to be used as a secondary app next to another Metro-style app or the Windows desktop. As you can see in Figure 8-3, the snapped view of the People app provides a handy miniaturized version of the full app.
Figure 8-3: The People app in snapped view
Managing Accounts
While you may have many contacts and other information associated with your Microsoft account, it’s as likely that you use other account types for e-mail, contacts, calendar, and task management too. And for this reason, the People app is one of a few places in Windows 8 from which you can configure other accounts as well. Configurable account types include:
• Facebook: The world’s most popular social networking service, Facebook is a great way to keep up with your friends’ and families’ activities. In Windows 8, the People app will pull information from your Facebook friends list (that is, contacts) and provide a look at their activities in the What’s new view.
• Twitter: This very popular micro-blogging service has emerged as a social networking wunderkind in its own right, providing numerous feed types, topic searching, and follower and following lists. Twitter posts, called tweets, will appear in the What’s new view.
• LinkedIn: Popular with upwardly mobile, white collar wage earners, LinkedIn is the social network for those who wish to keep up with co-workers and professional contacts. The People app integrates with your LinkedIn contact lists.
Microsoft is in the process of replacing Hotmail with a new web-based e-mail service called Outlook.com. It works similarly to Hotmail.
• Microsoft/Hotmaiclass="underline" Microsoft’s popular web-based mail service is the basis for most people’s Microsoft accounts, and since Windows 8 uses this account as your sign-in by default, chances are you’ve already configured one. Hotmail provides e-mail, contacts, calendaring, and task services, and as with the Google account type, each surfaces in the appropriate Windows 8 apps. The People app, as you’d expect, integrates with your Hotmail contact list.