Here's what my Start screen looks like, showing off the various different tile sizes: small, medium, wide and large.
The new large tile is pretty cool because it shows off more off a picture (like in the News app above, or an artist in the Music app), and allows you to view several things at once:
Mail app/new menu visual aid
The Mail app has changed colour from teal to blue to fit in with the Outlook and Outlook.com colour scheme, although you can hardly tell.
You should be able to see a long thin blue bar at the bottom of the above screenshot, with three white dots on the far right. This is a new visual aid that Microsoft has put into some of the default apps that come with Windows, to help people new to the Metro user interface. It does the exact same thing as right clicking did (and still does because the three dots doesn't appear in every app), which is bring up the menu bar:
It also appears in Internet Explorer, this time in black to match the colour scheme of the app:
Media/Volume Control
Next up, this is the main thing I would miss (and did miss) if I had to go back to Windows 7, the media/volume control. It hasn't changed much since Windows 8 but I did notice it was slightly translucent, not sure if that's new or if it's always been like that. As you can see it let's you pause and control what you're listening in Xbox Music, and shows album art.
It's really simple but well executed, so it's good to see it hasn't changed too drastically. Hopefully we will see other apps like Spotify and Rdio make use of it if they don't already, haven't tested them yet (don't think they have Windows 8 apps yet actually):
Smart Search
In Windows 8 the search charm would search within an app, within your files, and within settings, but not everywhere on your system. In Windows 8.1 the search charm defaults to an 'Everything' setting, so it's basically like the search function on an iPhone or iPad.
However what Microsoft is expecting people to use it for the most is to search the web (obviously) and so it's been trumpeting this new Smart Search feature. When you search for a well known person or group, you get this really nice visual search result with pictures, brief biography, and a button that takes you to the Wikipedia app and the article for that person. If it's an artist you can play their songs from Xbox Music. After that you get Bing search results with nice screenshot thumbnails of each site.
You can also search for people that you know. For example, here's what happens when I search for two of our great leaders (emails redacted):
I think Smart Search is going to become one of the really cool, standout features of Windows 8. It's pretty awesome and looks beautiful, don't you agree?
There's only one problem. It's powered... by Bing
:( :cry2: :nono: :facepalm: :bleh: ._. =O :mad: :umm: :eek:
Well. It's not THAT bad. But yeah, Smart Search. Pretty pretty pretty cool.
