Like many other Metro-style apps, the People app supports the system-wide Search contract, so you can use this capability to find a particular contact whether you’re currently in the app or not.
To search from within People, type Winkey + Q. This displays the standard Search pane, with the People app selected. Now, just type part of the name of a contact you’d like to find. When you press Enter, the search results appear within the People app, as shown in Figure 8-12.
What’s amazing about these new system-wide Metro features, of course, is that you don’t even have to be using People to search for contacts. In fact, you can do so from anywhere in Windows 8: the Start screen, another Metro-style app, or even from the desktop.
Figure 8-12: Search from within People.
To see this in action, return to the Windows desktop (Winkey + D) and tap Winkey + Q. The Search pane appears as expected, so start typing part of the name of a contact you’d like to find. But this time, instead of just typing Enter, select People from the list of apps. Voila! The search results are returned in the People app.
Seeing What’s New with Your Friends, Family, Co-Workers, and Other Contacts
In addition to functioning as a super-powered address book, the People app also provides a What’s new feed that aggregates content from Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts. It’s a one-stop shop where you can find out what’s going on with your friends, family, and other contacts, no matter where they’re posting information. The What’s new view is shown in Figure 8-13.
What’s new provides a decidedly Metro-y take on this sort of information, with each post segregated into a tile-like space. Scrolling occurs horizontally—that is, left to right—and not vertically, as with document-based applications. And while the app will refresh this view periodically, you can refresh it yourself by enabling the app bar and clicking the Refresh button.
One of the neatest things you can do, of course, is interact with your contacts by leaving comments and other feedback to their posts. What you can do varies from account type to account type. For example, you can also choose to “like” a Facebook post, mark a Twitter “tweet” as a favorite, or “retweet” something you see on Twitter. To do any of this, find a post you like and click it. It will display full screen, as in Figure 8-14, providing a more complete view that includes others’ comments as well as whatever actions are available.
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.
Viewing Your Digital Persona… And Creating Your Own Posts
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.
Understanding the Mail App
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.