Alarm Tab

If you travel much, this feature could turn out to be one of your machine’s most useful functions. It’s reliable, it’s programmable, and it’s fun to use (Figure 8-2).

Microsoft starts you off with a dummy alarm, set to 7 a.m., but switched off.

To change the time, click it to enter editing mode (Figure 8-2, right). Now you can edit the alarm’s name, time, repeat schedule, alarm sound, and snooze time.

When you finally hit the Save () button, the Alarm screen lists your new alarm (Figure 8-2, left). Just tap the On/Off button to prevent an alarm from going off. It stays in the list, though, so you can quickly reactivate it another day, without having to redo the whole thing.

You can hit the + button to set another alarm, if you like.

To edit an alarm, click it and proceed as described above; to delete it, click it and then tap .

When the alarm goes off, a notification appears on the screen, identifying the alarm and the time, and the sound rings.

You can snooze it or dismiss it (turn it off for good).

Figure 8-2. The Alarms & Clock app can’t wake the computer to wake you. So you should think of it more as a system to remind you of something while you’re actually working (and the computer is on and awake).
Left: Your list of alarms.
Right: Setting up a new alarm.

World Clock

The second tab of Alarms & Clock starts you out with one clock, showing the current time where you are.

The neat part is that you can set up several of these clocks and set each one to show the time in a different city. The result looks like the row of clocks in a hotel lobby, making you seem Swiss and precise.

By checking these clocks, you’ll know what time it is in some remote city, so you don’t wake somebody up at what turns out to be 3 a.m.

To specify which city’s time appears on the clock, hit the % button at lower right. Type in the city you want; as you type, a list of matching cities appears. Hit the one whose time you want to track.

As soon as you tap a city name, you return to the World Clock display, where your new city time appears. Here’s the fun you can have:

• Zoom through time. As Figure 8-3 makes clear, this is an interactive set of clocks. You can scroll through time and watch them change.

  

  Figure 8-3. Bottom: Click the Compare icon to make the time ruler appear at the bottom of the screen.
  Top: Drag that ruler with your finger, or use the < and > buttons, to zoom forward or backward in time. The cool curvy shadow across the world indicates whether it’s day (white) or night (dark), and the city tags show you what time or day—and even what new day—it is.

• Pin a clock to the Start menu. Right-click (or hold your finger down on) a city’s time. From the shortcut menu, choose Pin to Start. And presto: There, on the right side of your Start menu, a new tile appears. It will always show that city and its current time, for your quick-glancing pleasure.

• Delete a clock. Right-click it (or hold your finger down on it). From the shortcut menu, choose Delete.

Timer

Countdown timers are everywhere in life. They measure the periods in sports and games, cooking times in the kitchen, penalties in hockey. The third tab in the Alarms & Clock app, Timer, is a countdown timer. You input a starting time, and it counts down to zero.

To set the timer, click the big digits; now you can change the name and the time of the timer. Hit the Save () button.

Finally, hit . The timer counts down toward zero. You can hit the button to pause the countdown, if you like. You can also hit to restart the countdown, to start it over, or to make the numbers big and bold enough to see from the moon.

When the timer runs out, you get a notification and a sound, which will keep chiming until you hit Dismiss.

Stopwatch

You’ve never met a prettier stopwatch than this one. Hit to begin timing something: a runner, a train, a long-winded person who’s arguing with you.

While the digits are flying by, you can tap the Lap button () as often as you like. Each time, the Laps list identifies how much time elapsed since the last time you tapped Lap. It’s a way for you to compare, for example, how much time a runner is spending on each lap around a track. The large digits tell you how much time has elapsed since you started the stopwatch.

Tap to freeze the counter; tap to resume the timing. If you tap , you reset the counter to zero and erase all the lap times.

Working with Views

When you open Calendar, your first order of business is to point it to your existing online calendars: your corporate calendar (Exchange), one of Microsoft’s various free services (Outlook.com, Live.com, Hotmail, MSN), Google’s (Gmail), or even Apple’s (iCloud). (Yes, Apple’s. That sound you hear is hell freezing over.)

If you don’t already have one of these accounts, you can create a free Microsoft account on the spot.

Then you see something like Figure 8-5. Using the toolbar at top, you can switch among these views:

• Day looks exactly like a day-at-a-time desk calendar. Scroll up and down to see the rest of the day.

• Week fills the main display area with seven columns, reflecting the current week (that is, Sunday through Saturday).

• Month shows the entire month that contains today’s date.

Figure 8-5. The Windows calendar is very, very simple. Switch views using the icons at top. Turn categories on or off using the checkboxes at left. Point to an appointment (or tap with your finger) to see a pop-up details bubble, as shown here.

Navigating in any of the column views is easy and fun for the whole family:

• Touchscreen: Swipe vertically to move through the hours, horizontally to move through the days.

• Mouse: Turn the scroll wheel to move through the hours; add Shift to move through the days.

• Keyboard: The and keys go to the previous/next day, and the and keys go to the previous/next hour.

In Month view, on the other hand, there’s only one way to scroll: Vertically, with your finger, keyboard, trackpad, or mouse.

To jump back to today’s date, hit Today.

Making an Appointment: Quick Way

The basic calendar is easy to figure out. After all, with the exception of one unfortunate Gregorian incident, we’ve been using calendars successfully for centuries.

In Day, Week, or Month view, tap or click the correct time slot or date square. A little new-event box appears, where you can specify the name for your appointment (“Lunch with Chris” or whatever); start and end times (if, in fact, they’re not already correct); and a location. Click Done or press Enter. You’ve just created an appointment.

Making an Appointment: Detailed Way

That “click-to-make-a-one-hour-appointment” method is quick and easy. But what if there’s more to the story? What if you want a reminder? Or you want it to occur every week? Or you want to specify a calendar category (like Work or Home)?

In that case, you should open the more complete Details screen shown in Figure 8-6. Ways to open Details:

• Open the small “new event” box first, as described already. Then hit “More details.”

• Press Ctrl+N. Of course, this method is slower than the click-the-time-slot method, because you have to specify the time and date manually.

• Click “New event” at the top-left corner of the screen. Once again, you have to specify the time and date manually.

Figure 8-6. Here’s where you both create a new appointment and edit an old one. When choosing the End time, the drop-down menu shows you how long the appointment will be if you choose each time (“30 minutes,” for example). Nice touch.

On the Details screen (Figure 8-6), you can specify everything about the new appointment:

• Event name. For example, you might type Fly to Phoenix.

• Calendar – [Account]. This is a drop-down menu on the right side of the “Event name” box. Beneath headings that represent your various calendar services—your Live.com account, Google, iCloud, Exchange, or whatever—you see whatever calendar categories you’ve created on that calendar service. You might see “Work – Gmail,” “Football Club – Gmail,” and “PTA Work – Outlook,” for example.

  These color-coded subsets can be anything you like. One person might have calendars called Home, Work, and TV Reminders. Another might have Me, Spouse ’n’ Me, and The Kidz. A small business could have categories called Deductible Travel, R&D, and R&R.

  (You can’t create or edit calendar categories in Calendar itself—only on the originating services.)

• Location. This field makes a lot of sense; if you think about it, almost everyone needs to record where a meeting is to take place. You might type a reminder for yourself like My place, a specific address like 212 East 23, or some other helpful information, like a contact phone number or a flight number.

• Start, End. Separate drop-down menus (and a drop-down calendar) let you specify a date and time that this event starts and stops.

• All day. An “All day” event, of course, refers to something that has no specific time of day associated with it: a holiday, a birthday, a Windows book deadline. When you turn on this box, the name of the appointment jumps to the top of the day/week/month square, in the area reserved for this kind of thing.

• Event description. In this big box, you can type or paste any text you like—driving directions, contact phone numbers, a call history, or whatever.

• People. If the appointment is a meeting or some other gathering, you can type the participants’ names here. As you type, a list of matching names from your People app appears, to make it easy to choose the one you want. (You can also type out a full email address of anyone here.)

  Once you’ve added a person’s name, you can add another, and then another. Later, when you’re finished creating this event, the Send button at top left will invite your lucky recipients via email. Each message comes with an iCal.ics attachment: a calendar-program invitation file. In many mail and calendar programs, opening this attachment automatically presents your invitation; the recipients can respond (by choosing the Accept, Maybe, or Decline buttons that appear in their calendar programs).

For each appointment, you can have even more fun with the options in the top toolbar. You can also indicate the following:

• Show as. If you’re on a shared calendar—in an office, for example—the options in this drop-down menu are pretty standard: Free, Busy, Out of office, and Tentative.

  For each event you put on your own calendar, you can use these tags to signal coworkers your availability for meetings or calls. Your colleagues won’t see what you’re doing during that block (“Haircut,” “Me time,” or whatever)—only that you’re “Busy.”

• Reminder. This drop-down menu tells Calendar when to notify you when a certain appointment is about to begin. You can specify how much advance notice you want for this particular appointment. If it’s a TV show, a reminder five minutes before airtime is probably fine. If it’s a birthday, you might set up a warning a week in advance, so there’s time to buy a present.

• Repeat. This button opens a new set of controls for recurring events: Daily, Weekly, and so on. Or you can turn on the day checkboxes to specify any more-complicated repeating pattern, like “Tuesdays and Wednesdays” or “First Monday of every month.”

  You can also set an end date—a date when you want the repetitions to stop.

• Private (). If other people can see your chosen account (for example, if it’s an Exchange calendar you use at work), then turning on this box means they can’t see this particular appointment. Great for events like “Colonoscopy” or “Court date re: public nuisance charge.”

When you’re finished setting up the appointment, hit the “Save and close” button at top left, or press Ctrl+S. (If invitees are involved, that button may say “Send” or, if you’ve made changes, “Send update.”)

Your newly scheduled event now shows up on your calendar, complete with the color-coding that corresponds to the calendar category you’ve assigned.

Inspecting an Event

Usually, Calendar shows you only each appointment’s name. But if you tap it or (with the mouse) point without clicking, a little box pops out to show more detail—the location and name of the person who created the appointment, for example.

If it’s a meeting with other invitees, there’s a handy button there: “I’m running late.” One click, and boom: An outgoing email is written and addressed to everyone else who was invited to that meeting. Click Send and then run for the cab.

If it’s a repeating event, you have the choice of editing just that one event or the entire series of them.

Editing Events

To edit an event, just click it (with your mouse or trackpad) or tap it twice (with your finger). You return to the screen shown in Figure 8-6, where you can make any changes you like.

Rescheduling Events

If an event in your life gets rescheduled, you can drag an appointment block vertically in a Day- or Week-view column to make it later or earlier the same day, or horizontally to another date in any view. (If you reschedule a recurring event, Calendar asks if you want to change only this occurrence, or this one and all future ones.)

If something is postponed for, say, a month or two, you’re in trouble, since you can’t drag an appointment beyond its month window. You have no choice but to open the Edit box and edit the starting and ending dates or times—or just cut and paste the event to a different date.

Lengthening or shortening events

If a scheduled meeting becomes shorter or your lunch hour becomes a lunch hour-and-a-half (in your dreams!), changing the length of the representative calendar event is as easy as dragging in any column view (see Figure 8-7).

Tip:

In Week view, if you’ve grabbed the bottom edge of an appointment’s block so that the cursor changes, you can drag horizontally to make an appointment cross the midnight line and extend into a second day.

Figure 8-7. To make the drag handles appear at top and bottom, tap a block with your finger—or, with the mouse, point without clicking. You can now drag the event’s little white handle to make it take up more or less time on your calendar.

Deleting Events

To delete an appointment, open it and then hit Delete at the top.

If you’re opening a recurring event, like a weekly meeting, a drop-down menu offers “Delete one” (you want to operate on only that particular instance of the event) or “Delete all” (the whole series from that point forward).

If other people have been invited, then the button says “Cancel meeting” instead of Delete; they’ll be notified about the change. And when you hit that button, you’re invited to type a little message of apology or shame.

What’s in the Left-Side Panel

At the left side of Calendar, there’s a handy panel of options. (If you see only a narrow strip of icons, hit the at top left to open the panel.)

There’s a mini calendar, for quick navigation of your life’s timeline. Below that: a list of your calendar accounts and the color-coded categories within them. By turning a category’s checkbox on or off, you can show or hide all appointments in that category. That’s an incredible way to wade through a crowded schedule to focus on, say, your kids’ events. (There’s an “Add calendars” button, too, for adding new calendar accounts.)

Below that: four icons. There’s Mail (because email is something you often do when you’re calendaring), Calendar (because you may want to switch back), People (opens your contacts list), and Settings. Read on.

Settings

If you choose at lower left, you open the Settings panel on the right edge of the window. Here you’ve got these categories:

• Manage Accounts. Edit or delete any of your calendar accounts (Outlook, iCloud, Gmail, and so on).

• Personalization. What color scheme do you prefer? Do you want black/dark-gray backgrounds (“Dark mode”), white/light-gray ones (“Light mode”), or whatever you picked for Windows itself (“Background, Colors, Themes, and Fonts”)? What wallpaper photo do you want for the background of Mail (has nothing to do with Calendar)?

• Calendar Settings. Specify what you consider the first day of the week (affects how Month and Week views appear), which hours of the day you work (affects how Day view appears), and which days of the week you work (affects how “Work week” appears). You can also allow week numbers to appear on your calendar (as in, “Week 1” for the first days of January), or turn on Alternate Calendars (like Hebrew Lunar, Umm al-Qura, and so on) to make Calendar display a second label on every month and date.

  If you have Outlook (the desktop app, the phone app, or a free Outlook.com account), you can also turn on Interesting Calendars. Those are canned sets of dates for TV program schedules, sports, concerts, and other events that Microsoft has put together for you. (From the drop-down menu, choose which of your calendar accounts you want to receive these Interesting items.)

• Weather Settings. Choose your preferred temperature units (F or C).

• What’s new. Opens a web page pointing out the new features in Mail and Calendar.

• Help. Opens a web page where you’re offered some Help pages for using Calendar.

• Trust Center. If this switch is on, you’re turning on “locally relevant content.” It will “provide functionality that’s relevant to your usage and preferences.”

  But you knew that.

• Feedback opens the Feedback Hub (“Feedback Hub”), to send suggestions to Microsoft.

• About tells you your Calendar version.

The Camera Roll

To see the picture or video you’ve just captured, jump into the Camera Roll. It’s a special album that holds photos you took with this computer (as opposed to those you’ve rounded up from other sources).

The Camera Roll opens when you tap the lower-right screen icon, which looks like a miniature of your most recent snap. You’re now faced with handy buttons like Delete, Rotate, Crop, Edit, Print, and Share. Technically, you’re now in the Photos app, which is why you have to turn to “Editing Photos: The Mini Photoshop” to read about the functions of these buttons.

Search

This search box finds everything from everywhere: songs, bands, albums; on your PC, in Microsoft’s music stores. As you type, a drop-down menu proposes name matches, to save you typing.

My Music

Here are all the physical music files (MP3 files, for example) that Groove has found in your Music folder or your OneDrive’s Music folder.

Use the Songs, Artists, or Albums buttons to specify how you want your music displayed. You see something like Figure 8-11.

In general, all three of these views are alike: They present all your music, grouped by album, performer, or individual song. At the top, four important controls appear:

• Shuffle all. When turned on (appears in color), Groove Music will play back the music on this screen in random order. The number in parentheses shows you how many songs you’ve got.

• Sort by. This drop-down menu lets you sort the music you’re examining by date, alphabetically by name, by year, by musical genre, or by performer.

• Filter. This drop-down menu lets you show only the music files from one source or another: “Available offline” (you won’t need an Internet connection), “Streaming” (not actually on your computer—playing over the Internet), “Only on this device” (not showing what’s on your network or OneDrive), “On OneDrive,” “Purchased” (from the now-defunct Groove service), or “Groove Music Pass.” This item shows you whatever songs you’d downloaded from Groove Music while it was still alive and you were paying monthly.

• Genre. Another drop-down menu. This one lets you see only the songs that are Country, Jazz, Pop, Rock, or whatever.

Figure 8-11. You can sort your music using the drop-down menus at top.
In Albums and Artists views, you see cover art like this. In Songs view, you see a simple table—a list—with columns for title, singer, album name, length, and year of release. The button and + button (meaning “Add to a playlist”) also appear.

Whenever you’ve drilled all the way down to a list of songs (from a certain band or on a certain album, for example), checkboxes appear as you point to each song’s name. As soon as you start checking boxes, a strip of options appears at the bottom of the screen, referring to what you want to do with these selected musics: Play them, add them to a playlist (+), or delete them. There are also buttons for Cancel (select nothing) and “Select all.”

In Albums and Artists view, clicking or tapping takes you to further information screens, with options like Play, Add to (playlist), Show artist, Pin to Start, Edit Info, and Delete.

Recent Plays

Here’s a list of songs you’ve played lately.

Now Playing

Whenever music is playing, no matter how far you’ve meandered in Groove Music, the “Now playing” button in the list at left () summons a full screen of information. It shows the album art, the list of songs from that album, and a “Save as a playlist” button.

Playlists

A playlist is a group of songs you’ve placed together, in a sequence that makes sense to you. One might consist of party tunes; another might hold romantic dinnertime music; a third might be drum-heavy workout cuts.

[Your Name]

The icon here reveals your name and account details.

Settings ()

Here’s the full Settings page for Groove Music. Most of the options here are self-explanatory, but a few are worth noting:

• Music on this PC. Here you tell the app which folders contain your music files. You can even import playlists from an existing copy of Apple’s iTunes.

• Set Now Playing artist art as my lock screen. Cool: When your computer is sitting there, unused except as a jukebox, its Lock screen can show what’s playing right now.

• Set Now Playing artist art as my wallpaper. Windows can even change your desktop wallpaper along with each song, showing the photo of the performer.

• Mode. Do you prefer white text against black, or black on white?

Meet Maps

When you open the Maps app, you see—a map.

You can scroll in any direction. You can also zoom in or out, using any of the usual techniques (two-finger pinch or spread; turn the mouse’s scroll wheel). You can also double-tap or double-click to zoom into a particular spot.

Figure 8-13. Right: When you search for something, Maps shows you the results as dots on the map.
Left: When you select a search result, Maps turns into a full-blown Yellow Pages. It shows you the name, address, phone number, ratings, and other information about the business, complete with buttons like Directions, Nearby, Website, Call, and Add to Favorites.

On the right: four awesome buttons. Here’s what they do, from top to bottom:

• Rotate North to top. Click or tap to orient the map so that north is up. (Which seems like a “duh” function, until you realize that sometimes you’ll have rotated the map deliberately and need to get it back.)

• Tilt. Angles the map in a sort of 3D-ish way. You might find that it better resembles those car-dashboard GPS displays this way.

• Show my location. If you ever find that you’ve scrolled (or searched) away from your home location, this icon (or the Ctrl+Home keystroke) makes the map scroll and zoom until the “You are here” diamond is dead center on your screen.

• Map views. This icon opens a palette of viewing options. “Aerial view” displays the map as satellite photos of the real world. Zoom in far enough, and you can find your house. (As opposed to the usual view—roads represented as lines—which Microsoft calls “Road view.”)

  Turn on “Traffic” to see free, real-time traffic reporting—color-coded on major roadways, showing you the current traffic speed. Green for good traffic flow, yellow for slower traffic, and red for true traffic jams. You can even opt to see icons for Incidents (accidents and construction sites, for your stressing pleasure) or Cameras (speed-trap cameras—beware!).

  If you don’t see any colored lines, it’s either because traffic is moving fine or because Microsoft doesn’t have any information for those roads. Usually you get traffic info only for highways, and only in metropolitan areas.

  “Streetside” is Microsoft’s version of Google’s Street View, and is described next. And the Windows Ink toolbar () provides a palette of tools that, if you have a touchscreen and a stylus, let you draw or write notes onto the map (great for showing other people important places or directions) and measure distances.

Streetside

Streetside (Figure 8-14) is a mind-blowing way to explore maps. It lets you stand at a spot on the map and “look around.” You’re seeing actual photos of the street you seek; you can turn right or left and actually move through the still photos. It’s a great way to investigate a neighborhood before you move there, for example, or to scope out the restaurant where you’re supposed to meet someone.

(To create Streetside, Microsoft, like Google before it, has to drive specially equipped photography vans up and down every single road in the world, capturing photos and GPS data. So far, it’s done so only in the most populated areas of the U.S. and Europe, but it has big plans.)

Figure 8-14. The bluish tints on streets and towns indicate Streetside availability. In these areas, you can see, with photos, exactly what it looks like to be on the ground at a certain spot on the map. Drag to look around you. Click or tap farther down a road to jump there, or click in the navigation bar at bottom. (It may not appear if the window is too small.) Zoom with your mouse wheel, or by scrolling on the trackpad or pinching with two fingers on the touchscreen.

When you turn on Streetside (on the “Map views” palette), the map changes. If you zoom out enough, you’ll see puddles of blue shading in populated areas. These are the places where Streetside is available. Click there (or navigate there), and then proceed as shown in Figure 8-14.

Searching the Maps

You’re not always interested in finding out where you are; often, you want to see where something else is. To search Maps, hit and then type into the search box at top.

Here’s what Maps can find for you:

• An address. You can skip the periods (and usually the commas, too). And you can use abbreviations. Typing 710 w end ave nyc will find 710 West End Avenue, New York, New York. (In this and any of the other examples, you can type a zip code instead of a city and a state.)

• An intersection. Type 57th and lexington, ny ny. Maps will find the spot where East 57th Street crosses Lexington Avenue in New York City.

• A city. Type chicago il to see that city. You can zoom in from there.

• A zip code or neighborhood. Type 10024 or greenwich village nyc.

• A point of interest. Type washington monument or niagara falls.

• A commercial establishment. You can use Maps as a glorified national Yellow Pages. If you type, for example, pharmacy 60609, blue numbered dots show you all the drugstores in that Chicago zip code. It’s a great way to find a gas station, a cash machine, or a hospital in a pinch.

  Select a listing to see a full dossier about that place.

Directions

If you choose Directions (), you get two search bars, labeled A and B (Figure 8-15, top left). That’s right: Microsoft is literally prepared to get you from Point A to Point B.

Type in two addresses, using the keyboard. After typing, press Enter or tap the .

Three features save you time here:

• The A address may already say “My Location.”

• If you’ve saved any locations as Favorites (described in a moment) or in Cortana preferences (“Setting Up Cortana”), then they appear here, too, for quick selecting.

• As you type, Windows displays a tappable list of matching locations.

Once you’ve selected your A and B, hit “Get directions.” A choice of proposed routes appears on the map, showing the distance and the estimated time for your travel (Figure 8-15).

Three option icons appear above the directions summary. They let you specify how you’re planning to travel: by car, by public transportation, or on foot. Yes, that’s right: It’s turn-by-turn walking directions.

Figure 8-15. Top left: The Swap button () switches the A and B locations, which is great when you want to find your way home again.
Lower right: Driving instructions include icons for accidents and construction. Tap one of those icons to open a panel describing the details and expected clearing time.

Choose the route you want. At this point, on a tablet, Maps is a full-blown GPS navigation app. It shows where you are as you drive, speaks turning instructions, and auto-scrolls the map as you drive. You can also hit the > at top right to view upcoming turns. (Hit the at top left to end the guidance.)

Favorites

If you’re like most people, you tend to live in one place. You probably have a home, and you may very well have a place of work. It’s possible you have a friend or two.

Fortunately, you don’t have to painstakingly re-enter these addresses every time you want directions someplace. You can designate any place, or even any set of directions, as a favorite; just tap the that appears on the information panel for any address or establishment. From the shortcut menu, choose Favorites, Home, or Work.

Once you’ve accumulated a few, it’s easy enough to call them up again: Tap the icon at top. Tap a Favorite place to see it on the map.

3D Cities

All the time Microsoft was trawling the world’s cities to create Streetside, described above, it was also assembling 3D Cities, which is closely modeled on Apple’s Flyover feature. It depicts certain cities (150 and counting) as three-dimensional models—like aerial views, except that you can peek behind buildings (Figure 8-16).

Figure 8-16. 3D Cities is a dynamic, interactive, photographic 3D model of certain major cities. It looks something like an aerial video, except that you control the virtual camera. You can pan around these scenes, looking over and around buildings to see what’s behind them.

To try it out, hit the 3D Cities icon () on the toolbar. Choose from the list of cities. Here’s what you can try out if you have a touchscreen:

• Move the map by dragging with one finger.

• Zoom by pinching or spreading with two fingers.

• Rotate the map by twisting two fingers.

• Change your viewing angle by dragging up or down with two fingers.

If you have a mouse or trackpad:

• Move the map by dragging.

• Zoom by turning the mouse wheel (or dragging two fingers on the trackpad).

• Rotate the map by pointing to the little compass needle (at the top of the vertical toolbar). A tiny rotation-arrow button appears on each side, which you can click to turn the map.

• Change the viewing angle by adding the Shift key to the zooming method.

Offline Maps

Ordinarily, the Maps app gets its pictures of the world from the Internet, downloading them as you scroll. That generally works—except when you’re not online, or when you’re on an expensive cellular connection. In both cases, the solution is offline maps: Download the map images for a certain country before you go there.

To do that, go to →→Apps→“Offline maps.” Hit “Download maps.” Choose a continent, and then a country, whose images you want to download now, while you still have an Internet connection. Windows tells you how much room each one will require. (There’s a “Delete all maps” button, too, so you can recover the space once your trip is over.)

You can also choose where you want the downloaded maps stored (“Storage location”), whether or not you want to download them when you’re on a cellular connection (“metered connection”), and if you want them updated as Microsoft improves the maps (“Automatically update maps”). That’s an acknowledgment that maps change all the time (roads are built, empires crumble).

Touchscreen Basics

Narrator is especially important on touchscreen computers; if you’re blind, how else are you supposed to navigate the screen?

Drag your finger around the touchscreen; Narrator speaks everything you touch, so that you can get a feel for the layout of things. You can also tap to hear a single item identified; you don’t have to worry about opening something accidentally.

Of course, if touching something makes it say its name, then how are you supposed to open it? Simple: Add another tap. That is, you double-tap when a single tap usually works (or press-and-hold) and triple-tap when you’d ordinarily double-tap.

To see the master cheat sheet of touch gestures in Narrator (and to hear it read to you), tap three times with four fingers against the screen. You’ll learn essential tips like these:

There’s a lot more to Narrator. For instructions, see the free downloadable PDF appendix “Narrator” on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Customizing News

It turns out that your News app is customizable. You can ask it to bring you stories about your favorite actor, your favorite toothpaste, or even you.

When you select Interests in the menu column, you see a scrolling list of topic tiles—the same ones that appear across the top. You can tap or click to turn off the ones you don’t want cluttering up your newspaper.

You can also add topics or news sources at this point. Each of the categories before you (Featured, News, Entertainment, and so on) offers subcategories that you can turn on with just a click or tap on the + button. (Or click the tile not on the + button to get a preview of what you’ll see there.)

Or hit + at the top and type in anything you like; as you type, News shows you matching topics or sources. Click the one you want. Waterski magazine. Electric cars. Seedless watermelon. Whatever you might like your customized newspaper to show you.

You can add as many new topics as you like.

Figure 8-22. No hard-to-read color schemes or ugly fonts. No blinking ads, banners, or obnoxious animations. If the 300 publications presented here pique your interest at all, then the News app is, for sure, the way to read them.

The other icons in the menu column at left include these:

• Sources. Here’s where you can view or search all 300 news sources that News can access. “Favorite” a few, and then you can jump directly to those publications in the left-side menu bar. Or see all their stuff in one place, on the My Sources tab.

• Local. If you grant the app access to your location, it automatically presents articles from your local newspapers and websites—no charge.

• Video. This section gives you direct access to videos from Bing’s multitude of sources. That’s something a typical printed magazine doesn’t usually offer.

Especially on a tablet, wow—News is one of the best things to come along since hyperlinks.

Notepad Basics

Notepad opens automatically when you double-click text files (those with the file extension .txt). You can also find it by typing notep in the search box (“The Search Box”).

You’ll quickly discover that Notepad is the world’s most frill-free application. Its list of limitations is almost longer than its list of features. For example, the Notepad window has no toolbar and can work with only one file at a time.

Above all, Notepad is a text processor, not a word processor. That means you can’t use any formatting at all—no bold, italic, centered text, and so on. That’s not necessarily bad news, however. The beauty of text files is that any word processor on any kind of computer—Windows, Mac, Unix, whatever—can open plain text files like the ones Notepad creates.

About Word Wrap

In the old days, Notepad didn’t automatically wrap lines of text to make everything fit in its window. As a result, chunks of text often went on forever in a single line or got chopped off by the right side of the window, which could produce disastrous results when you were trying to follow, say, a soufflé recipe.

Now lines of text wrap automatically, exactly as they do in a word processor. But you’re still seeing nothing more than the effects of the Format→Word Wrap command—an option you can turn off, if you like, by choosing the command again. (You can tell when Word Wrap is on by the presence of a checkmark next to the command in the Format menu.)

Artistic Tools

When the app first opens, it presents a Welcome screen; hit Start to get going. Now, on the top toolbar, eight icons make up your artistic arsenal. (To identify them, point without clicking, or tap with your finger—or just hit … to make their text labels appear.) Here’s what they do:

• Brushes. Lets you draw or write on any object with a marker, calligraphy pen, oil brush, watercolor, pixel pen, pencil, eraser, crayon, spray can, or paint can. Just pick a brush, a thickness, an opacity, a color, and a texture—and go to town.

• 2D shapes. Gives you options to make lines and curves, as well as 24 canned line shapes: squares, triangles, arrows, stars, checkmarks, and so on. Once you create a shape, you can 3D-ify it or leave it 2D, whereupon it wraps itself to whatever object is behind it.

• 3D shapes is the heaviest hitter, object-creation–wise. It opens a panel at right with these major components:

  3D models are ready-to-use basic objects: male-ish, female-ish, dog, cat, and fish, along with a “Get more models” button.

  3D objects are shapes you may recall from geometry class—cube, sphere, cylinder, cone, and so on.

  3D doodle. What if you want to make your own shape? Here you get a hard-edged drawing tool and a soft, pillowy version.

  In each case, the process goes like this. First, select the model, object, or doodle tool you want. Then choose a color from the palette (or use “Add color” to specify your own shade), and a material from the drop-down menu (Matte, Gloss, Dull metal, Polished metal).

  To create your object, drag in the drawing area. If you’re using the model or shape tool, your drag determines the size of the object; if you’re using its Doodle tool, sketch a complete shape (for example, a cloud). Boom: A 3D object is born. You can select it, rotate it, shrink it, enlarge it, or change its color later, as described below.

• Stickers. This tool wraps 2D images, as though they’re stickers, onto 3D objects (see Figure 8-25). The app starts you out with fun, cartoony ones: mouths, moustaches, noses, eyes, and so on. The next tab offers a choice of textures: rocks, tree bark, concrete, marble. These may be buried, but they’re important. They let you transform your featureless, plastic 3D blobs into realistic real-world objects. The animators at Pixar use exactly the same technique—although they use software that’s much, much, much more sophisticated.

  

  Figure 8-25. Top: Select a sticker and then click or tap a 3D object to make it cling there. Pull the corners to change its size; drag the button to rotate it. To stamp the same image repeatedly, use the button. The makes it stick.
  The finishes on the Textures tab act like stickers. Here a spot of wood has been enlarged to cover a generic block. (The third tab lets you rifle through your own files for images to use as stickers.)

  On the last tab, you can add your own sticker from any image file on your PC. You might, for example, start taking your own photos of the perfect textures, or import clip art from the pros. See Figure 8-25.

• Text. This tool lets you type in 2D or 3D. Whatever you type in 2D ends up sticking itself to the canvas in the back; anything you type in the 3D tool gains a little thickness and hangs wherever you place it (visible in Figure 8-25).

• Effects includes 22 lighting effect filters—including several straight from Minecraft, like medium-blue “Day,” maroon “Nether,” and the ominous-feeling “The End.” Drag the sun icon around the light wheel at the bottom of the pane to move the light source; this effect is particularly impressive if you have chosen “Gloss” or “Polished metal” finish for any of your models.

• Canvas. This tool controls the 2D background—the white rectangle Microsoft calls the canvas. Using this pane, you can resize the canvas, rotate and flip it, turn it on or off, or make it transparent—like a piece of clear glass that you can still draw, stick, or write on.

• 3D Library is a rabbit hole into a searchable online library containing over a million 3D objects. You’re free to drop any of them into your artwork. (You can also get here with the “Get more models” button on the 3D shapes pane.) The library is part of what Microsoft calls the Remix 3D online community; you’re welcome to upload your own objects to it, too.

To the right of these are the Paste, Undo, History, and Redo icons.

Other Tools

Underneath that bank of art-creating tools is a set of icons that let you manipulate your work and look at what you’ve made. Here’s what they do:

• Select. Every object you create is automatically selected at birth—it glows teal and sprouts handles that let you rotate it and push it backward or forward (see Figure 8-26). But what if you wander away and want to select that thing again? Hit this icon and then select your object.

  On the 3D selection pane at right, hit “Edit color” to change the color and texture; “Select all” to select and edit all of the objects in the file at once; Multiselect to add objects to your selection one by one (holding down Shift while selecting also does this trick); Group to join multiple objects to manipulate them simultaneously (and Ungroup when you’re done with that); and the usual cut, copy, paste, delete, and flip options.

  

  Figure 8-26. When you select an object, it sprouts eight handles you can drag to resize it. You also get four round handles; the arrows inside indicate how it moves your shape. For example, the one on the bottom rotates the object as though it’s on a turntable; the one above rotates the object like the hands of a clock. The handle on the left pushes the object toward or away from you.

• Magic select. Say you want to put your friend into your 3D world, but you don’t want the background of the photo. This tool lets you pull just what you want from any 2D image.

  First, insert a picture from your PC by hitting the Menu icon at top left, and then choose Insert. Now choose “Magic select” ().

  As directed by the hints in the right-side panel, start by dragging the handlebars inward to crop the photo down to, for example, the subject’s face or body. When you hit Next, Paint 3D does its best to isolate the element you were going for; see Figure 8-27.

  When you hit Done, your friend pops out from the background, now transformed into a floating layer. You can move it around, rotate it, resize it, and see it from any angle, including from behind. The background, meanwhile, remains; incredibly, Paint 3D even attempts to fill in the hole your friend left behind.

• Crop. This tool crops your 2D object—the canvas. Drag the handles to taste, and then hit the green checkmark.

• Mixed reality. This funky tool turns on your PC’s camera and superimposes your 3D creations onto the camera’s feed—which is most likely you, looking at your computer screen.

  An animated hand appears to demonstrate what’s about to happen: your objects will stick wherever you click or tap. For instance, if you tap your forehead, your objects drop onto your forehead; at that point, if you move in real life, they move with you. Click again, and they move wherever you newly clicked.

  To rotate the objects, drag them. To scale them up or down, pinch and zoom with two fingers, as on a phone, or turn your mouse wheel. On the right of your screen is a big, white circle—hit it to capture the hybrid screen image. To go back to editing your work, use the Paint 3D icon () at the top.

• 3D view. In this very helpful view, you can turn the whole masterpiece in space—up, down, tilted, rotated, and so on. There are several ways to see your work from any angle—or as Paint 3D calls it, “to orbit”: Right-drag with your mouse, or, on a touchscreen, drag with three fingers.

  

  Figure 8-27. Paint 3D cuts the desired area out of its photographic background. If it missed a chunk, draw on it with the Add tool; if it included too much, draw on the excess area with the Remove tool.

  You can also pan—slide your perspective up, down, left, or right without tilting or rotating. To do that, Alt-drag, or drag with two fingers (or hold down the Alt key and use one finger). To zoom in and out, use your mouse’s scroll wheel, or pinch and spread two fingers on a touchscreen. (If you’re using a digital pen—and this is a drawing program, so why not?—hold down the barrel button to orbit, or the Alt key to pan.)

• Adjust the zoom. Use this slider, from – to +, to see your artwork at 10 percent all the way up to 6,400 percent. That’s very close up.

• View more options. The last icon in the row, , offers a menu with three helpful functions: “Take screenshot,” “Reset view” (to 100 percent), and “View controls.” That last one pops up a handy window to remind you how to orbit, pan, and zoom in 3D view using your mouse, touchscreen, pen, or keyboard.

The Menu icon at top left () lets you save your finished masterpiece as an editable Paint 3D project, a 3D model, or a 2D image. Here, you can also insert a 2D image; upload to the Remix 3D community (provided that you have created an account therein); share a screenshot; or print to a 2D or 3D printer, or to a 3D printing service online. With that last option, you choose the scale and the material—you get choices like polyamide, alumide, rubber-like, steel, and so on—and Paint 3D gives you an estimated cost. It also warns you if, say, the walls are too thin to properly print, and helps you fix the problems.

Importing Addresses from Online Accounts

Delightfully enough, the People app can synchronize its contacts with online Rolodexes that may be very important to you: your contacts from Apple’s iCloud service, Google, Microsoft’s Outlook.com system, or your company’s corporate system.

That’s why the first thing you may see, the first time you open People, is an invitation to connect those online accounts to People. Choose the name of the network you belong to, and enter the name and password for that account.

If you don’t see that invitation, or if you declined it, you can always connect your accounts later. To add an account, hit the button at lower left. There, staring you in the face, are names of the accounts you’ve set up already.

To add a new one, use the “Add an account” link. Tap the kind of account you want: iCloud, Google, or whatever. Enter your account information, and boom—you’re done. The People app is now synced with your online accounts. Change information in one place and it’s also changed in the other.

Figure 8-28. The People app screen is a dashboard for quick access to the phone numbers and email addresses of your social circle. If you click one of the letter headings, you get the alphabetical index (left); select any letter to jump to that part of the alphabet.

You can repeat the process to add more accounts; in fact, you can even have multiple accounts for certain types (like Google and Microsoft email accounts).

It’s important to understand that you’re actually linking those Internet services to your Microsoft account. You have to do that only once, and then all your Windows starter apps—Mail, Calendar, People, and so on—can use their information.

The big payoff comes when you sign into another Windows 10 machine. To your delight and amazement, you’ll see that your address book is already filled in with all your contacts and accounts. Progress!

Even after you’ve hooked up some accounts like this, you’re not stuck with wading through the addresses of a million people you don’t care about:

• Hide an account. If you click , you get the “Filter contacts” dialog box shown in Figure 8-29. Here you can opt to hide the contacts in certain accounts (or those without phone numbers, for when you’re using People as a phone book).

• Delete an account. You can unsubscribe from one of your online accounts, too. Just hit Settings () and then select the account you wish to forget. On the resulting dialog box, choose “Delete account,” and it is banished.

Figure 8-29. In the “Filter contacts” box, you can turn off the checkboxes of certain accounts. That way, you’re hiding their address-book contents from your People browsing and searching. You’re not deleting anything, just hiding it.

Creating Address Cards Manually

Each entry in People is like a web form, with predefined spaces to hold all the standard contact information.

To add a new person, click +. You get the “New contact” panel. Fill in the obvious stuff—name, email—plus details like these:

• Add photo. Tap or click to open a mini Photos app, where you can choose a headshot for this person. It’s OK if the person’s face isn’t very big in the picture you choose; you’re offered the chance to crop down to just the head.

• Save to. Which online email address book do you want this name stored in?

• Phone number. Use the drop-down menu above the box (“Mobile phone”) to specify what kind of phone this is.

  Now, the trouble with people these days is that they often have more than one phone number, more than one email address, and more than one mailing address. Fortunately, all of these boxes are infinitely expanding. Choose + to add another blank box of the same type—another phone-number field, for example.

• Address. Weirdly, People doesn’t come with a mailing-address box already set up; you have to click the + Address button.

Once you’ve added the complete dossier for this person, hit the Save button to go back to the main People screen.

Editing an Address

People move, people quit, people abandon AOL. To make changes to somebody’s card manually, select it and then hit Edit. You return to the screen where you can add, remove, and edit fields. Hit Save when you’re finished.

Linking Contacts

If People discovers two contacts with the same name among your different accounts—say, one from Gmail and one from iCloud—it offers to combine them. Select the person’s name and scroll down on the right-side panel until you see the “Combined contacts” section. People shows you the two names it has found, indicates how it thinks they’re connected, and offers a Combine button. It automatically links the two, making it seem as though all the information appears on a single card. (There’s also a Separate button in case you change your mind.)

Pinning a Contact

Face it: Some people are more important than others. That’s why People lets you pin certain people—install their tiles—onto the right side of your Start menu. Just select the person’s name and then, on the right-side panel, hit . You can also pin your contacts to the taskbar using this icon, or using My People, as explained in the next section.

The People Panel (My People)

The People app isn’t the only access you have to your contacts; there’s a People icon right on your taskbar (Figure 8-30).

Its purpose is to serve as a speed-dial list of your Very Special Friends, which Microsoft calls My People. Up to 10 very, very special people get actual icons on the taskbar; everyone else appears in the My People panel that sprouts from the taskbar. Once you’ve installed all these names, you can fire off email or Skype messages without having to open the People app.

Here’s the fun you can have:

• Designate your My People. Choose the icon on the taskbar. (If it’s your first time, hit “Get started.”) If one of the lucky names appears in the Suggested list, select it; otherwise, hit “Find and pin contacts,” use the search box to find the person’s name, and choose it. That special someone’s icon now appears on the taskbar.

  Tip:

  To remove that icon from the taskbar, right-click it and choose “Unpin from taskbar.”

  Repeat the process until you’ve got three people pinned to the taskbar.

  Tip:

  In →→Personalization→Taskbar, you can change the number of taskbar People to any number from 0 (which means “Put everyone in overflow,” which means the People taskbar menu), to 10.

  If you do this “Find and pin contacts” business beyond three times (or whatever number you’ve chosen in Settings), the main People panel fills up (“overflows”) with the additional names. Keep going and the panel actually scrolls to accommodate as many My People as you like.

  Note:

  If someone you’ve pinned to the taskbar sends you an emoji via Skype, it pops right up on your taskbar as a giant, if somewhat mystifying, graphic (and sound). It hovers and animates for five seconds before disappearing.

  

  Figure 8-30. The first three pinned contacts (or whatever number you’ve chosen, up to 10) get icons on your taskbar. After that, they accumulate in the People panel itself. They’re all great for shooting out quick emails or placing quick Skype calls.
  You can even drag these little round buttons around to rearrange them.

• Use your My People. When you want to contact one of these special people, click his icon. You get choices like Mail, Skype, and People. (The Mail and Skype commands appear here only if you have, in fact, set up Mail and/or Skype.)

  If you choose People, you get access to this person’s full card—phone numbers, mailing addresses, recent conversations, and so on.

  If you choose Mail, you see your recent email communication with this person; hit + to compose a new message, right there in the panel. If you choose Skype, a tiny Skype panel appears, with buttons for phoning or video-calling this person (or inviting him to be your buddy, if he’s not already).

  The People panel remembers your choice—Mail or Skype—for the next time you use it.

The People panel is a cool idea. It would be cooler, of course, if it gave you access to more communications channels than Mail and Skype. (How about text, phone, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat…?) That seems to be the function of the Apps tab of the panel—but no other apps’ names can appear here until their software companies rewrite them, and that may never happen.

For now, let those friends know just how special they are.

The Four Tabs of Photos

Photos lets you see your photo collection in four ways, represented by tabs at the top:

• Collection. At top, Photos offers some ready-made assortments of photos and slideshows that may interest you. “New Orleans Last Week,” for example, or “On this day” (in past years), or “Friday in Phoenix.” Click one to open its video slideshow (see “Video Slideshows”).

  Below those tiles, you’ll find your entire photographic life, labeled by date. Just below the toolbar, at right, three tiny icons let you adjust the size of the photo thumbnails. Use the vertical timeline at right to zoom through your years’ worth of pictures.

  

  Figure 8-31. Especially if you have a touchscreen, you’ll find Photos a bare-bones but lovely way to browse your shots. You can edit them, too.

• Albums. Albums are virtual containers for any old rounded-up batches of photos. You can create one of your favorites, or one for each vacation, or whatever. Hit “Create an album” to view all your photos with checkboxes, so that you can go to town clicking the ones you want in this album; then choose Create.

  You wind up on a special Album page (use the to edit its name), featuring an animated slideshow preview at top; blue buttons for Watch (a slideshow), Edit (the slideshow), or “Create collage” (arranges some photos into a grid); sortable thumbnails of the pictures in this album; and some stats about this collection.

  You haven’t actually moved any photos—they’re all still in your master collection. You can, for example, include a favorite photo in as many albums as you like.

• People. Photos attempts facial recognition of the people in your pictures; on this tab, you see a round thumbnail for each person it’s found, complete with the number of photos it thinks you have of that person. Click a thumbnail to see all the pictures of that person—and to let the app know who it is.

  Alas, there’s no way to teach Windows to recognize faces it hasn’t already recognized, nor any way to combine separate “people” it’s found who are actually the same person.

• Folders. This screen lists the folders whose contents Photos is including in your photo collection. Back at the desktop, you have a Pictures folder. Any photos in this folder show up in the Photos app automatically. Same for the Pictures folder on your OneDrive.

  But on this screen, you can also tell Photos to display the contents of other pictures and drives. To do that, hit “Add a folder.”

Playing with Photos

The rules of Photos are simple:

• To view a photo, click or tap its photo thumbnail to open it big enough to see.

• To move through the photos once you’ve opened one, swipe horizontally (touchscreen), click the < and > buttons at the edges of the screen (mouse), or press the and keys (keyboard).

• Zoom in or out by spreading or pinching two fingers on the touchscreen, clicking the + and – buttons at the right edge of the horizontal scroll bar, pressing Ctrl and the + or – keys, or turning the scroll wheel while pressing the Ctrl key.

• To return to the thumbnail view, hit the button on the screen or press Alt+.

• The More (…) menu offers a Slideshow button () that starts a slideshow of all photos in this batch. Or press F5. Click or tap to end the show.

• To send a photo to somebody by email, or to send it into another app for editing, tap the Share button on the toolbar.

A Very Smart Search Box

Photos uses artificial intelligence to figure out what’s in your pictures—you know, like “cat” or “pond” or “pizza.” You can then use the search box to find them by name.

When you click into the search box, a menu offers quick-click buttons for People (faces that Photos has identified, as described already); Places (based on the locations where you snapped the shots—usually available only on phone photos); or Things (subjects the software has found). Of course, you can also type whatever noun you want into the box.

Windows isn’t as good at this as, say, Google Photos. But it’s getting better all the time.

Slurping in Photos from a Camera

Photos can import photos from a camera, memory card, flash drive, or any other drive, too. Just connect the camera, card, or drive to your machine, and then hit the Import button at the top. From the drop-down menu, choose “From a folder” (if the pictures are already on your PC somewhere) or “From a USB device” (if they’re on a camera, memory card, flash drive, or USB hard drive).

Hit Import. When it’s all over, you see the newly imported goodies nestled in their new home, in the Photos app.

Video Slideshows

Microsoft has been toying with the idea of an automatic slideshow-making module for a couple of years now. At one point, it was a separate app called Story Remix; then it was folded into Photos, but in a special window. Now it’s found a home in the Create menu, called “Automatic video with music.”

When you choose this command, you jump back to your Collection view, where you can select the photos you want in the slideshow (by clicking or tapping). Then hit Create, type a name for the video, and sit back and enjoy the results. It’s an animated slideshow, complete with an opening title, zooms and pans, and music.

At this point, you can choose:

• Remix it for me. Produces a variation of the same slideshow—different slide subset, different music, different effects.

• Export or share. Choose a file size for the video, and then choose “View in File Explorer” (to see the resulting file) or “Share to social media, email, or another app” to do exactly that. You’ll be offered a Share pane that features your My People (“The People Panel (My People)”), any Nearby Sharing computers (“File Sharing 1: Nearby Sharing”), plus icons for “Upload to YouTube,” Dropbox, Mail, Skype, and so on.

• Edit video. You arrive at a special editing screen (Figure 8-32). At the very top are buttons like Themes (canned looks for your slideshow—Adventure, Chilled, Electric, and so on) each incorporating a piece of music, a typeface, and photo-animation effects); Music (a choice of Microsoft’s music or your own music collection, along with the on/off switch for syncing your photos’ appearance to the beat—neat); a proportions control (either 16 × 9 rectangular, 4 × 3 squarish, or “Make portrait,” a better fit for phones held upright); Add to cloud (saves to your OneDrive, so you can edit this slideshow on another PC); and “Export or share,” described on the previous page.

  

  Figure 8-32. Top left: All the photos you originally chose for inclusion (and the option to add more).
  Top right: a preview of the movie so far.
  Bottom: The Storyboard, which is a map of the slideshow.

  In the Storyboard, you can delete photos (hit the ), rearrange them by dragging, change their timing individually (hit Duration), choose how to handle a photo whose dimensions don’t perfectly fit the frame (hit Resize, and then choose either “Remove black bars,” which also crops some of the photo, or “Shrink to fit,” which leaves black bars), apply Filters (special color tints that make photos look old-timey), overlay text (you get a choice of layouts and typefaces), or add some Motion to a photo (you get a choice of zooms, pans, and tilts).

Editing Photos: The Mini Photoshop

You might be a great photographer (although if your primary tool is a tablet or a laptop, that’s debatable).

But even pros touch up their work—and in Photos, an impressively complete suite of photo-editing tools awaits. These tools can rotate or crop; they can also fix the brightness, contrast, and color of your pictures, and even add special effects like selective blur and vignetting (where the photo corners are misty white to draw the eye to the subject).

To begin, open the photo that needs help.

Right here at the top, you’ve got your first editing option: a Rotate button. Each click (or each press of Ctrl+R) rotates your photo clockwise by 90 degrees.

But now choose Edit & Create→Edit to open the editing wonderland shown in Figure 8-33.

Ready? Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

Add 3D Effects

Pretty cool: a palette of animations that you can lay on top of your photo or video, including falling leaves, rising balloons, a snowy blizzard, fluttering butterflies, and so on (Figure 8-34). A timeline scrubber lets you control when the effect appears, and for how long; handles let you adjust its size and rotation; and a “3D library” pane offers a huge assortment of 3D objects you can drop into your photos or videos: wrapped presents, aliens, dinosaurs—you name it.

Figure 8-34. When you apply one of these animated overlays to a still photo, it becomes a video, whether you like it or not. You can add multiple animated overlays or 3D models to a single photo or video. Suddenly, you’re Pixar.

Tip:

Remember, these are 3D objects; the special handles around their selection boxes let you spin them in any direction.

Slapping a Photo onto the Lock Screen or Desktop

When you’re looking at a single photo (and not editing it), the … button at top right offers a secret shortcut menu. Its “Set as” command slaps the current photo onto any of these billboards: the Lock screen (“The Lock Screen”), the desktop background wallpaper (“Background (Wallpaper)”), or the tile for the Photos app on the Start menu’s right section (see the box below).

Selecting Photos (to Share or Delete)

Photos wouldn’t be much fun if your screen were the only place you could see them. Fortunately, the Photos app is happy to zap them away to your adoring fans electronically. Or, if they’re terrible shots, you can just zap them away.

Creating Notes

To create a new note, hit the + in the upper-left corner of the starter note, or press Ctrl+N. Then fill the note by typing or pasting.

Note the resize handle on the lower-right corner of each note. Drag it to make notes larger or smaller onscreen.

Figure 8-36. You can apply some limited formatting to your sticky notes, but only by using keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+U for underline.
See the automatically underlined links, dates, and phone numbers? Microsoft calls that formatting “Insights”; it means they’re clickable. Click a link, for example, to open that website.
You can turn this feature off, if you like; select a note, then …, then , and turn off “Enable insights.”

Formatting Notes

You can format the text of a note—a little bit. There are no menus, so you have to use keyboard shortcuts:

• Bold, Italic, Underline. Press Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, or Ctrl+U.

• Strikethrough style. Press Ctrl+T.

• Create a bulleted list. Press Ctrl+Shift+L.

You can also change the “paper” color for a note to any of five other pastel colors. To do that, click the … and choose from the shortcut menu.

Deleting Notes

To get rid of a note, click the little in the upper-right corner. When the program asks if you’re sure, click Yes.

On the other hand, you can exit Sticky Notes without worrying that you’ll lose what you’ve already typed. Right-click the Sticky Notes icon on the taskbar, for example, and choose “Close window” from the shortcut menu. The program disappears, but all your notes will be there the next time you open it.

Using WordPad

When WordPad first opens, you see an empty sheet of electronic typing paper. Just above the ruler, the Ribbon offers menus and buttons that affect the formatting of your text. As in any word processor, you can apply these formats (like bold, italic, or color) to two kinds of text:

• Text you’ve highlighted by dragging the mouse across it.

• Text you’re about to type. In other words, if you click the I button, the next characters you type will be italicized. Click the I button a second time to turn off the italics.

The Font formatting buttons let you change the look of selected text: font, size, color, subscript, and so on. The Paragraph formatting buttons affect entire paragraphs.

WordPad doesn’t offer big-gun features like spell-checking, style sheets, or tables. But it does offer a surprisingly long list of core word-processing features. For example:

• Find, Replace. Using the Find button (right end of the Home tab on the Ribbon), you can locate a particular word or phrase instantly, even in a long document. The Replace command takes that a step further, replacing that found phrase with another one (a great way to change the name of your main character throughout your novel, for example).

• Indents and Tab stops. As shown in Figure 8-39, you click on the ruler to place tab stops there. Each time you press the Tab key, your insertion point cursor jumps in line with the next tab stop.

  

  Figure 8-39. WordPad’s formatting ribbon makes it a surprisingly close relative to Microsoft Word. These buttons make paragraphs flush left, centered, flush right, or bulleted as a list. You can drag through several paragraphs before clicking these buttons, or you can click them to affect just the paragraph where your insertion point already is. The little L’s on the ruler indicate tab stops that have been clicked into place; each press of the Tab key makes the insertion point jump to the next one.

• Bulleted lists. You’re reading a bulleted list right now. To apply bullets to a bunch of paragraphs, click the Bullets button (). If you click the ▾ next to it, you can create a numbered or lettered list instead.

• Insert object. This button lets you create or slap in a picture, graph, chart, sound, movie, spreadsheet, or other kind of data. (The “Paint drawing” button opens up a temporary Paint window so you can whip up a quick sketch that then gets dropped into your WordPad document.)

• Drag-and-drop editing. Instead of using the three-step Copy and Paste routine for moving words and phrases around in your document, you can simply drag highlighted text from place to place on the screen.

The Guided Tour

If you’ve ever played an Xbox game, much of the Xbox app should look familiar (Figure 8-40):

• Top left. Here’s a list of the Xbox games you’ve been playing recently. You’ll need this list if you ever decide to try that game-streaming business, as you’ll see in a moment.

• Lower left. Featured games from the Microsoft Store—that is, games the company dearly hopes you’ll buy.

• Center column. This is your activity feed, exactly as it appears on the Xbox. It shows what your friends have been doing in their games and lets you comment on or “like” their achievements.

• Right column. Here’s your list of friends and clubs—all of them, whether they’re online at the moment or not. You can see what they’re doing right now on their Xboxes (“Watching TV,” “Blu-ray Player,” “Halo,” or whatever), send them messages, start a party chat, invite them to game sessions, watch their recorded game clips, and so on. (Click a friend’s name to summon the Invite and Message buttons in a toolbar at top.)

Figure 8-40. The Xbox app is a wireless global companion for your Xbox console at home—and for your universe of friends and enemies on the Xbox service. The Xbox app is a remote control for your Xbox, which also makes it possible to play games on your laptop that physically run on the Xbox elsewhere in the house.

Game Streaming

OK, here it is: The much-celebrated Xbox game streaming. Your Xbox One console is actually running the game, but you’re playing it on a Windows 10 computer elsewhere on the same Wi-Fi network. Here’s how to get it going.

First, the setup: The Xbox One and your Windows 10 machine have to be on the same network—very fast Wi-Fi or a wired network are recommended—and you have to sign in with the same Xbox account (gamertag) on both.

1. Set up the Xbox One for streaming.

   On the Xbox itself, go to →→Preferences. Turn on “Allow game streaming to other devices.” On the same screen, under “Enable the SmartGlass connection,” select either “From any SmartGlass device” or “Only from profiles signed in on this Xbox.”

2. On your Windows 10 machine, open the Xbox app. Tap (top left) to open the menu column. Hit Connection.

   The “Connect to Your Xbox” screen opens, and the app scans the network for Xbox One consoles.

3. Select your Xbox’s name.

   If the fates are smiling, you’re now connected. New options appear for streaming, power, and media remotes. You now have remote control of your Xbox One!

4. Select Connect. Within the Xbox app, find a game you want to play. On its details screen, hit “Play from console” at upper right.

   In just a moment, the game appears on your Windows 10 machine’s screen. You can plug in a USB game controller, if you like, or just use the keyboard—but either way, you can marvel at the miracle of gaming that transcends the barriers of space and time.

   Well, sort of.

Screenshots and Game DVR

If you do something extra-cool in a game, it’s not enough just to brag about it; you’ve got to capture a picture of it (a screenshot) or record it as a video, using the Game DVR feature.

You take a screenshot of a game the way you would any other window: Alt+PrtScn (“Run”).

But in the Xbox app, life gets even sweeter, because you can also record video of your gameplay. In fact, you can record video of anything you’re doing on your computer, even if it’s not a game and has nothing to do with the Xbox. Keep that in mind next time you’re making a training video.

To set this up in the Xbox app, open →→Gaming→Game DVR. Turn on “Record in the background while I’m playing a game.” (If you can’t turn that on, then get a less wimpy PC.) Other settings here govern the quality of the recordings, maximum length, audio, storage location, and so on. Now you’re ready.

The Game Bar

Open any app on your computer. It doesn’t have to be a game. It could be Maps, or Mail, or a web browser—doesn’t matter. The Xbox app, running in the background, will be able to record its video image.

When you’re ready, press +G.

Now the Game Bar appears. It has five icons: Take screenshot (saves a still image), Record that (captures the last 10 seconds of activity—yes, it’s retroactive recording, great for game highlights!), Record from now (start recording), Mic on/off, and Start broadcasting (read on). You also get mini-buttons that shut off the mic and camera while you’re broadcasting.

To start recording, hit the “Record from now” button, or press +Alt+R.

Now go about your business in whatever app you’re using. Play, zoom, scroll, click, do whatever you need to do. Behind the scenes, the Xbox app is creating a beautiful audio-and-video clip. You have an hour to fill, if necessary.

When it’s all over, press +Alt+R again. (Or if you can’t remember that, press +G to open the Game Bar, and then click the square Stop Recording button.)

How do you find your recording? Open the Xbox One app; select the Game DVR icon (the sixth icon down). Your new recording appears here, named after the app, the time, and the date.

Here you can play it back, trim it, rename it, delete it, share it, or open the folder it’s saved in (which is your Videos→Captures folder, in case you were wondering).

Figure 8-41. Top: Doesn’t matter if you’re recording a web browser, a map, or a spreadsheet; if you want to capture video, tell Windows it’s a game.
Bottom: The big red Record button on the Game Bar starts the recording within the current window. In this case, you’re making a thrilling fly-through of your Maps app.

Broadcasting Your Games

These days, games aren’t just fun for the person playing them. Millions of people find it just as entertaining to watch other people play games. Mostly, they do that by heading over to Twitch.com, the world headquarters for watching people play games (live and streaming, so that you can interact by typing comments), but Microsoft now offers its own, super-simple version of the same thing on a site called Mixer.com. (It’s what was called Beam when Microsoft bought it in 2016.) Not only is Mixer free and easy to use, but the tools you need to broadcast your own game-playing sessions are built right into Windows. If your streams become popular enough, you can even make money through a Mixer “partnership.” (Note, though, that Mixer is newer and much smaller than Twitch or YouTube Gaming, so there may be fewer sponsorship dollars to go around.)

When it’s showtime, fire up the game you want to broadcast—any kind, any brand. Open the Game Bar by pressing +G. Then, when you’re ready, press +Alt+B, or hit the button.

As shown in Figure 8-42, a setup console now appears. Double-check these parameters:

• Broadcasting window. What do you want the world to see? Just the game, or the entire Windows screen (which could be useful if you intend to switch apps mid-broadcast)?

• Camera Position. Which corner of the screen should hold the live camera view of your face as you play and talk?

• Microphone on, Camera on. Some people don’t show their faces when they broadcast; occasionally, they don’t even wisecrack and narrate as they play.

The preview shows how your broadcast will appear to the world. If you approve, choose “Start broadcast.”

Everything you’re doing is now visible to anyone who has joined your Mixer.com channel, which Windows creates automatically. (It’s named after your Xbox Live name.) Your action also appears on your Xbox Live activity feed, so your Xbox friends can admire it using their game consoles.

Figure 8-42. You’re getting one last look at how you’ll appear to the world of fellow gaming nerds before you go live.

A small window, showing your broadcast, appears as you play; at the top, a thin control bar offers buttons for pausing the broadcast, moving the camera’s inset, turning off the camera or microphone, switching to the chat window, and seeing how many people are watching you (and how long you’ve been broadcasting).