Windows 8 : Customise the Start screen

The Start Screen is full of nice, big, chunky tiles that represent all your apps. The tiles are easy to see in small groups, but what if you have hundreds of apps installed? Most will be hidden from view, unless you want to do a lot of scrolling. Enter the new semantic zoom feature. If you’re using a touch display, squeeze the Start screen with two fingers to receive a bird’s eye view of your entire screen contents. And the feature is also available to mouse and keyboard users: Simply hold down the Ctrl button, and use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Also holding Ctrl button and pressing + or – will work.

Categorize your apps

Your Start screen can become a cluttered mess if you collect too many apps and other elements that have been pinned to the screen as tiles, so take advantage of built-in organization tools that let you divide everything into labeled groups.

First, drag all the tiles you want to assign to a single group to the far right-hand side of your Start screen in vacant territory; the OS should sequester the tiles together. Once you're satisfied with your assembly, use semantic zoom (described above) to get a bird's eye view of your desktop. Now right-click the group, and select the "Name group" option on the left of the bar that appears below. Type in the name, and enjoy your newly organized Start screen!

Comments

Karabiner: Mouse/keyboard customizer for OS X

For beginners, or the one who migrated from Windows environment, Natural Gestures (Scrolling and Swiping) might be bit confusing. But, once you get familiarized with them, it may feel like "What was I doing, all those days?". It all changed, when I connected external mouse to my Macbook. When you start using that WHEEL, you will be confused. Luckily there is a setting for mouse, to change scroll behavior (natural or the other way). But, here's the catch. If you toggle that setting, it also toggles the same for TRACKPAD!!!!! I've seen that many people were freaked out and even raised BUG report to Apple. But, all those reports were closed, saying that is not a bug, but intentional feature!!! For those, who can't leave with such one-sided settings, here is a simple util, which came to my rescue: Karabiner It's simple, powerful and stable mouse/keyboard customizer for OSX. Without going into much detail, here's the configuration I used to ret...

USB port not working on Mac

Recently I connected an external hard-disk to my new MacBook and observed that it was not properly detected on one of the USB ports. But I can see that it is powering my HDD. I tried switching to other port and it worked. I simply ignored it by thinking that my HDD cable might be loose. Now I bought a new USB drive and to get it detected, I have to insert and detach it multiple times. And as usual, I suspected the new USB drive, as my Mac is brand new. And planned to replace my USB drive. Now my HDD came back to my mind. And also my earlier laptop, in which few KEYS went unresponsive due to accumulated charges. By little researching I found that I'm not alone. The solution that worked for me was "Resetting SMC" Here is the procedure I followed: Shut down the Mac and connect the power cable Hold down Shift+Control+Option+Power concurrently for a few seconds. When the light on the power adapter blinks or changes colors you’ll know SMC r...

HSQLDB

It's been almost two years I've been using HSQLDB in one of my client-critical application. When I was given the task of working on this application (which was already in production), main challenge was to reduce latency and also to make it flexible enough to accommodate any future use-cases. Without going into to much details, here's my use-case: Application receives data from multiple sources Parse data from each source and extract required data Aggregate this extracted data and find best candidate which satisfies certain rules One simplest solution is to join data from all sources by having a (for-)loop, one each for a source and apply rules inside inner-most loop. As number of data sources increases, so does the latency. HSQLDB came to my rescue. I used in-memory variant, as the data is non more required, once a candidate is found. Data extracted from each source is stored into DB (from here on, DB => in-memory HSQLDB), where...

TechniFul

Search This Blog