How do I get to all my applications in Windows RT 8.1 Blue Preview?

With Microsoft releasing the Windows 8.1 (Blue) upgrade for download yesterday evening and us always wanting to jump into new technology, our first impressions of Windows 8.1 (Blue) upgrade on our test Windows RT tablet were pretty good. There were some good things, and some difficulties. One of those difficulties were around getting to our applications using the familiar ways we learned in RT. The following is from one of our consultant’s experiences. Keep checking back often as we blog about our experiences with the Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 previews!

All my apps are gone!!!

For those of you who have installed the 8.1 Blue preview, you may have found it more difficult to find any of your applications that are not pinned to the start screen.

Previously in Windows RT (and in Surface Pro), you could just swipe up and then click on the icon in the corner to view all you applications.

However, in the update, this has been replaced by an icon for customizing the groups of apps in the start screen (sorting and naming groups). This is easier now than it was before for those functions, however it didn’t get me to what I wanted, which was access an application tile not on my start screen.

All was not lost however. I could still search for an app (swipe from the right and choose search from the charms menu) and then open it. But to actually get to an app’s tile and then select it to pin to the Start, I found the following two ways:

First, the swipe method:

Once in the start tile screen, just swipe up from the middle of the screen to be presented all of your applications. Swiping up or down then swaps between all apps and the start screen. It makes sense, but wasn’t as intuitive as I expected and was discovered with some trial and error.

Second, the more apps icon:

The second isn’t obvious, but if you notice small things is pretty easy to catch. If you swipe your start screen all the way to the right you will notice an arrow in the lower left corner pointing down. clicking on that will take you to all of your applications, same as the swipe down does.

Take away:

While not immediately intuitive, I think my kids could have found these quickly enough and after using it a few times I find it to be a much faster way to get to my apps without having them on the start screen.

I hope our consultant’s experience can help some of you who are wondering where all of your applications are in the Windows 8.1 preview. We hope to have more of their experiences in the coming posts to give you some exposure to Microsoft’s newest version of Windows 8.

Jason Condo
Principle Consultant