Charming: Windows 8 'Charms' You

 

If you haven't already come across Windows 8 Charms, take a good look at the set of icons above and get used to them! These are going to become a prominent part in your everyday operations of windows 8 fast, so its worth discovering them early.

Charms are a set of quick launch 'smart' tools that allow you instant access to control features, such as standard control sets such as wifi status, volume, notifications, etc. to more specific controls within metro apps.

That's right. You may have seen me refer to these tools as smart, and that's because they tailor to their requirement depending on your current activity. For example, straight from the messaging app I can check out the settings charm to add messaging accounts and configure permissions, whilst over in the gallery, I can check out the Share charm to send the picture across to different services depending on compatible Windows 8 apps.

Devices is something of a less obvious charm, however allows you to send a display to a second screen if you have one available or send something to a printer.

Finally, the search charm, and my favourite charm of all, takes the age old concept we've all come to know through different incarnations over various versions of Windows, and adds a whole new layer of turbo-awesomeness! The search charm replaces the standard system search, and allows you to search for apps, settings or files. That's pretty bog standard, but the best part comes with the in-app searches. Launch the search charm and you'll see a list of all searchable apps. These are sorted in order of the most recently searched, so if Bing is top of the list, then you search for Mail, then Mail will head straight to the top. Next, you just need to start typing to notice things happening, results appearing, or previous search phrases for quick searching. The final beauty is you don't necessarily need to launch the charm to start searching. On some (most, if not all) apps, you can just start typing. That's all you need to do. Start typing, and the rest is done for you.

It's fast, effective, and unlike any Windows search facility of the past. In fact, I feel compelled to say it feels like an opportunity Google have really missed out on!

So that's the new charms interface. Like I say, take a moment to get to know them, figure out how they work, and how you can make the most of them. Unlike many of the features that get bundled into a windows OS only to never be used and discontinued by the next OS release, Charms are here to stay.

Admin Tools

A handy feature in Windows 8 allows you to instantly place all administrative tools on the start menu. To do so, open the start menu and then hover over the top or bottom right corner to present the 'charms' interface. First go to Settings, then click Tiles. There will be one option here to 'Show Administrative Tools'. Set this to 'Yes'. That's all there is to it!

Tiles Overview

Windows 8 tiles interface has an overview mode. Many apps incorporate this view, which can be accessed through a small set of +/- buttons on the bottom right corner of the screen. Once in overview, you can typically click on a 'set' or tile (depending on the interface used when developing the overview) to focus on that particular area of the app.

BBC News Overview Snippet

Different apps may include the overview in different ways to others, for example the default weather app will provide a list of tiles explaining the section they lead to, as oposed to the graphical tile interface used by the BBC (screenshot).

Along with the overview, some apps make use of the +/- keys to provide other functions, for example viewing an image in the default gallery app makes use of these buttons for zooming in and out.

Give it a shot, the first play you'll see these buttons are on the start menu.