This is my Start Screen. I have customised it exactly to my needs, creating groups of tiles with headings and organising the tiles to my liking. The whole process takes a minute or two, no more. I have also opted for a plain colour background here to keep it slick and simple, in keeping with the Metro philosophy.
Semantic Zoom is where you can set up and name groups. You access Semantic Zoom via a small icon in the bottom-right corner of the Start Screen (not visible until you mouse near it).
Organising your tiles is a simple matter of clicking and dragging them to where you want them.
Right-clicking on a tile brings up a number of options.
Right-clicking anywhere gives you the option to view “All Apps”. This shows you everything you can access from the Start Screen and is much the same as the “All Programs” link in the Windows 7 Start Menu, except that it doesn’t hide things inside multiple layers of folders.
So that is the Start Screen. It is the most different thing you will need to deal with but, as you can hopefully see, it is dead easy to use and is a big step up from the Start Menu in Win7. Of course, all the familiar keyboard tricks work here, just as they do in Win7. e.g. You can press the WIN key, which brings up the Start Screen, start typing and Windows 8 will start searching.
In this example I was on the Desktop, I pressed the WIN key, then typed “z” and was presented with the search screen within about half a second. From there I can select whatever it is that I was looking for. As you can see, the right side offers a lot more categories than just applications, so you can use this quick method to search for anything on your computer. It is very cool and so fast it almost seems to anticipate what you are about to type. WIN+Q also brings up search and WIN+F brings up a search screen with “Files” pre-selected.
The way you just organised that start menu screen makes me now want to try win 8 again. I had no idea with the small amount of time I played in Win 8 I could do that!
Can you choose to make some tiles bigger etc? Like say i wanted PS to be a large 2 square icon and the other adobe apps under it as 1 square?
You can only resize the Metro apps, not desktop applications like Photoshop. Hopefully the changes they are making to Windows Phone, which will soon have three different size tiles to choose from, will trickle across to Windows before too long.
The thing is, though, that I almost never see the Start Screen. I log -in, click the desktop icon and spend pretty much the rest of my day on the desktop. I feel like I should try and use the Metro stuff more but I don’t really have any need for most of it, especially with the latest overhaul to Hotmail.