• Canceclass="underline" Click this button to save a draft of the message or delete it.
The default set of options provided by Mail here are, of course, decent. But if you display the app bar in this view, you’ll find many more options. These include:
• Save draft: Click this button to save a draft of the current message.
• Attachments: This most interesting of commands triggers a Metro-style file picker view, providing you with a way to select one or more files from common filesystem locations—Documents, Pictures, Music, and the like—and apps that surface files from online services, including Camera, Photos, and SkyDrive, which is shown in Figure 8-24.
Figure 8-24: You can add file attachments using a standard Metro-style file picker.
• Copy/Paste: This button, which will read Copy/Paste or Paste depending on whether anything is selected and/or in the Windows Clipboard, lets you perform common Copy and Paste operations.
• Font: A simple font picker with several fonts and font sizes from which to choose.
• Bold, Italic, and Underline: Three common text-related commands, each with its own button.
• Text color: A simple font color picker with just several colors.
• Bulleted list: A way to start a bulleted list or select text and then change that to a bulleted list.
• 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.
Searching for E-mail
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.
Configuring the Mail App
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.
Snap: Sharing the Screen with Mail App
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.
Calendar
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.
Understanding Calendar
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