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FIGURE 13-1 The typical default Start screen with the built-in apps and the app bar showing the command (third
from left) to make a wide tile smaller, into a square tile. The same command on a square tile might appear as Larger
(see overlay) if the app supports wide tiles.
When you first installed Windows 8 on a device, you might not have noticed that the Start screen
was somewhat quiet, tiles for a few built-in apps (like Weather, News, and Bing) were updating, but
most of them were static. But as soon as you ran some of those apps—which I imagine you did within a
couple of seconds!—the Start screen suddenly lit up much more, with many tiles changing every few
seconds as I attempt to show in Figures 13-2 and 13-3. This is because apps need to be run once to
make their initial connections to their associated web services and enable their live tiles 62 .
62 This is assuming two things. First is that you have Internet connectivity, which I mention with great irony because at this
very moment there’s a fiber optic breakdown between Sacramento and Oakland, California, that has myself and many
thousands of others completely offline! Second, I’m assuming that you’ve acquired and installed a copy of Windows 8 on a
development machine where the only preinstalled apps are those built into Windows. If you have a machine that came
with Windows 8 already on it, chances are you have some additional preinstalled third-party apps. These and the built-in
apps are effectively allowed to have live tiles from the get-go because the apps can be initially run prior to the system
image being placed on the machine.
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