While many of Windows 8.1’s major changes focus on the user interface, ultimately it comes down to the apps. After all, the modern-UI side of Windows 8 is supposed to be all about getting out of the way and letting you enjoy those big-screen, touch-friendly applications.
Microsoft has done a lot of work on its existing apps, and it has also come up with some new offerings. Following are some of the apps that are get-ting an overhaul or are making
their debut in Windows 8.1.
Alarm: The new Alarm app is a helpful addition if you want to keep a Windows 8 tablet at your bedside, but in its current state it seems a bit sparse. All the basics are intact, including a timer and a stopwatch, as well as the ability to set an alarm to repeat any given day of the week. The interface is slick, and the circular dial for setting times is cute. It would be nice to see some advanced functions, such as volume fade-in, wake to music, and a dimmer for using the app as a nighttime clock.
WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide
Alarm
Calculator: In Windows 8.1, Microsoft has gone above and beyond the basic desktop calcu-lator. The standard math functions are still present, but users can also switch to a scientific calcula-tor. With the unit converter, users can calculate volume, length, weight, temperature, energy, area, speed, time, power, and data. The new Calculator is especially use-ful when snapped side by side with the desktop, allowing you to calculate without messing around with window sizes.
Camera: If you enjoy taking photos with tablets, you’ll find lots of useful new features in the
Windows 8.1 Camera app. The interface is now a little less con-fusing, with quick-camera and video-capture buttons on the right side. The app menu includes a Camera Roll button, exposure settings, and the timer. Camera options, including video stabiliza-tion and aspect ratio, have moved to the Settings section of the charm bar.
Once you’ve taken a photo, the app provides some new editing options. You can also set a photo as your lock screen, open it in another app, or start a slideshow.
This app doesn’t offer drawing, cut-and-paste, or precise
crop-Camera
ping and resizing tools, but it looks like a fine choice for basic photo editing on touch-based PCs.
Food & Drink: Microsoft’s impressive new food app offers recipes, tips, and articles about food, wine, and cocktails, all gath-ered by Bing. Users can select from the app’s recipes or enter their own—either by typing it in or taking a picture of a paper rec-ipe. The app also lets you create shopping lists and meal plans, which you can share with other apps through the charm bar.
Less useful, at least in our experience, is the “hands-free”
mode that’s supposed to allow you to swipe through recipes using your PC’s webcam. Getting the app to respond to hand ges-tures was unreliable for us, so it might just be easier to swipe with your elbows.
Health & Fitness: Packed with features, Microsoft’s new Health
& Fitness app is a sprawling pro-gram. The main page provides links to fitness exercises, news articles, nutrition tips, and medi-cal news.
The app’s diet, health, and exer-cise trackers have potential, but right now they’re far too limited.
The diet tracker lets you record what you’ve eaten, but its data-base of items is lacking. (For instance, it has information on some Subway salads and sand-wiches, but not others.) The exer-cise tracker can’t sync with popu-lar fitness services such as Fitbit and Runkeeper. The health track-er is fine if you have weight, cho-lesterol, blood pressure, and vac-cination details on hand, but it’s basically just a record-keeping app. For now, the Health &
Fit-WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide
ness app is best for general health tips, not for keeping tabs on your own well-being.
Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer 11 boasts some truly useful changes in Windows 8.1.
Most helpful is the ability to open up to three webpages side by side in separate windows. Opening multiple windows creates several instances of IE 11 in the Windows multitasking menu, so you can return to any open pages even if you drag them out of snap view.
Other tweaks include syncing among all Windows 8.1 devices, a “reopen closed tab” function, saved passwords, and a built-in download viewer. And for those
people who can’t stand modern-style IE’s insistence on hiding tabs and the address bar, IE 11 includes a setting to show them at all times in a collapsed view.
Photos: Microsoft has changed the interface for the Photos app in Windows 8.1, bringing it clos-er to the file pickclos-er that appears in other apps. Strangely, the abil-ity to view online photo sources such as SkyDrive, Facebook, and Flickr was missing in our tests.
That may be just a bug, however, as online sources were available through the file picker in other apps. As for editing tools, the Photos app mirrors the Camera app, with a mode that includes
Reading
List
lighting tweaks, red-eye reduc-tion, and other options.
Reading List: While it’s no replacement for Pocket or other true read-it-later apps, Reading List offers a simple way to save articles for another time. You don’t have much to do in the app itself, at least not until you’ve saved up things to read by using the Share charm in other apps, such as Internet Explorer or News.
Keep in mind that this app behaves a bit differently from other readers. Instead of suck-ing up the text into the app itself, Reading List merely sends you back to the original source.
The downside to this approach is that the app doesn’t work as an ofline reader.
SkyDrive: At last, SkyDrive’s modern-style app functions more like its desktop counterpart in Windows 8.1. Users now have the ability to cut, copy, paste, and rename files, as well as to make files available for ofline access.
You also have the option to make all SkyDrive files available ofline.
Aside from those substantive changes, the SkyDrive app’s inter-face has been tweaked, with smaller icons that allow for more items on the screen at once.
Sound Recorder: Like the
desk-WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide
Windows Store
top Sound Recorder app, the new modern-style version is dead-simple. Just press the microphone button and start recording. You can trim an audio file, rename it, or delete it.
Windows Store: The Windows Store is now much more inviting in Windows 8.1. The layout is completely different, with a sin-gle carousel of featured apps on the left side, followed by several rows of suggestions. These tiles are less crowded than they were in Windows, and they each include a short written descrip-tion. Individual app pages are getting a makeover as well, with everything laid out on a single, scrollable page. Overall, the Win-dows Store feels less sparse and easier to browse than it did in Windows 8.
Xbox Music: Microsoft’s Xbox
Music app is get-ting a major visual overhaul in Windows 8.1.
The new design is a departure from the hori-zontally scroll-ing, modern-style apps we’re used to, with a navigation
col-umn on the left side, and a verti-cally scrolling list of artists on the right. It’s definitely an improvement, more conducive to quickly accessing your music.
The app also does a better job of explaining itself. Small dialog boxes tell you when music has been stored locally or in the cloud, while buttons at the top offer clear options for sorting your collection.