- Windows 8 Platform Preview Navigation Tips and Tricks
- Navigating in Metro
- Navigating in Desktop
Navigating in Metro
From the Metro Start screen, you can navigate among all the tiles either by using your keyboard arrow keys and the Enter key to select, or mousing to the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen.
To customize the behavior of live tiles, right-click them with your mouse. This action invokes a context-sensitive pane called the App Bar (see Figure 6) where we can resize the tile, uninstall its associated app, or unpin the app from the Metro Start screen.
Figure 6 Customizing live tile behavior using the App Bar
Once you finish your live tile customization, left-click the mouse anywhere in the Metro background area.
As long as your screen resolution is set to at least 1280x768, you can “snap” two Metro apps (or one Metro app and one Desktop app) to see them simultaneously, side-by-side, on your screen (see Figure 7).
To do this, move your mouse to the left side of the screen; thumbnails of running apps will appear (see Figure 8). Next, right-click your mouse and select a Snap option from the context menu.
Figure 7 Snapping apps in Windows 8
Figure 8 Snapping apps in Windows 8
Take a look at Figure 8. Do you notice the split bar between the Headlines Metro app and the Desktop? You can click and drag this split bar with your mouse to resize the snapped window. If you want to return to a single-app view, simply drag the split bar off-screen.