When you activate the Messaging app bar—by right-clicking a blank area of the screen, tapping Winkey + Z, or swiping toward the center of the screen from the top or bottom edge—a few additional commands are revealed.
• Status: This button allows you to set your online status, which is how you will appear to other contacts in their own messaging applications. Available choices in the pop-up menu that appears when this button is clicked include Available (what we used to call “online”) and Invisible (“appear offline”).
• Invite: This button triggers a pop-up menu with two choices, Add a new friend and View invites.
• Delete: This command lets you delete the currently selected thread. It will delete the entire thread, and not any individual part of the thread.
Managing Accounts
Messaging is primarily a Microsoft Messaging (formerly Windows Live Messaging) client, and as such it will be automatically configured to access this service if you sign in to your PC using a Microsoft account as we recommend. That said, you can also connect to Facebook’s messaging service (as you can from Windows Live Messenger), and we suspect other services will come on board over time, thanks to the Windows 8 extensibility features.
Accounts are added and managed in Messaging as they are in other Metro-style apps like People, Mail, and Calendar, through Settings, Accounts. Unlike other apps, however, Messaging does not support multiple Messaging or Facebook accounts: You get only one of each.
Working with Threads
To start a new messaging thread, click the New message link. The unique People chooser interface will appear, as shown in Figure 8-42.
Figure 8-42: The People chooser lets you pick a contact to communicate with.
The People chooser is very interesting, because it connects to whatever Metro-style apps that have registered with the system to provide access to contacts, or the People app by default. But as more such apps become available, you’ll be able to choose contacts from those apps, too, using the drop-down control to the right of the People title in the chooser.
The chooser is also smart about which contacts to show you. That is, it doesn’t provide you with a rote list of every single contact you have. Instead, it only shows you those contacts that are connected to a compatible service. You can optionally toggle the view between all of these contacts and only those who are currently online.
Once you’ve selected a contact, you return to the main Messaging view. If you’ve not yet communicated with the selected contact, a new thread will be created. If you have, the new messages you’ll exchange will be appended to the end of your existing thread.
Messages within a thread follow a logical form, using rectangular conversation “bubbles” that are similar to those in other messaging apps, such as the one in Windows Phone. Each time you hit Enter, that message—contained in its own bubble—is completed and sent to your contact.
Handling Notifications
Since most people won’t want to stare at the Messaging screen and wait for a new message to arrive, Messaging supports the standard Windows 8 notifications capabilities and will provide pop-up notification “toasts”—along with a corresponding notification sound—whenever a new message does appear. These toast notifications will appear briefly on-screen, near the top-right corner, no matter where you are in the system, on the Start screen, while using a different Metro-style app, or on the Windows desktop. A typical Messaging notification can be seen in Figure 8-43.
Figure 8-43: Messaging notifications appear over other Windows 8 experiences.
This is probably obvious, but Messaging notifications will not appear when you’re using Messaging. If you receive a message from another contact outside of the thread you’re currently viewing, Messaging will do one of two things:
• If a thread already exists for that contact, the thread is moved to the top of the threads list.
• Otherwise, a new thread is created and added to the top of the threads list.
To deal with a Messaging notification, just click it and you’ll be brought into the Messaging app where you can read the entire message and reply if necessary.
Of course, notifications are, by definition, interruptions and you may want to configure the way the system deals with notifications globally or for Messaging particularly.
As with other apps, you can configure some notification settings in Settings, Permissions, including whether Messaging notifications are enabled in Windows and on the lock screen.
Notifications can also be globally and temporarily toggled on or off using the Settings pane. To access this interface, type Winkey + I or open the Charms bar and then select Settings. From this interface, you can select the Notifications icon near the bottom of the pane to toggle this functionality, as shown in Figure 8-44.
Figure 8-44: Notifications can be toggled globally, on the fly, using this icon.
That functionality is nice from time to time, such as when you’re busy working and don’t want to be disturbed. But as you use Windows 8 more and more, you may find that you want to change the way Messaging notifications work going forward. This happens via the new PC Settings interface. (You can reach PC Settings at any time by accessing the Settings pane and selecting More PC settings.)
A few relevant options here include:
• Notification sounds: We happen to find the chime that rings each time a notification appears to be annoying. If you do too, change the option titled Play notification sounds to Off.
• Show individual app notifications: You can determine whether individual Metro-style apps, including Messenger, can even display notification toasts. Given the nature of this app, we recommend leaving notifications on for Messaging. But if you’re not interested, you can disable this behavior.
Snapping Messaging
Messaging provides a reasonably useful snapped experience by which you can snap the app to the left or right side of the screen alongside another Metro-style app or the Windows desktop. In this mode, only one of Messaging’s panes can be seen at a time, as shown in Figure 8-45.
Figure 8-45: Messaging app in snapped mode
Most Messaging functions work just fine in this mode. You can view individual message threads, add messages to an existing thread, and, via the hidden app bar, change your status or start a new message thread.
SkyDrive
For years, Microsoft has offered a cloud storage service called SkyDrive that has offered an industry-best allotment of free online storage—7 GB most recently—but few ways to use it effectively. As a result, SkyDrive had been largely ignored by the computer-using public, while competing offerings from Apple (iCloud), Amazon (Cloud Player and Cloud Drive), and Google (Google Play and Google Drive) have grabbed all the headlines.
SkyDrive has had a few names over the years, including Windows Live SkyDrive. Today, however, it’s referred to as Microsoft SkyDrive, or simply SkyDrive.