Chapter 9
Relaxing with Windows 8’s Photo and Entertainment Apps
In This Chapter
- Viewing photos from your PC and multiple online services with the Photos app
- Using the Camera app
- Understanding your options for more sophisticated photo needs
- Enjoying your music collection and accessing Microsoft’s Music Marketplace with the touch-friendly Xbox Music app
- Understanding your options for more sophisticated music needs
- Buying and renting movies and TV shows online and watching them with the Xbox Video app
- Understanding your options for more sophisticated video needs
In the old days, users would manage their media collections on their PCs and then sync a subset of their photo, music, and video content with devices and share a further subset via discs, USB devices, and online services. While these activities are still possible in Windows 8, and will no doubt be quite popular for some people, Microsoft is embracing a new way of doing things that more closely mirrors related changes in the tech industry.
The new way of doing things was triggered by a technological advance called cloud computing. In this new model, your data isn’t stored on a single hard disk on a single PC, where it’s inaccessible from other PCs and devices and could potentially suffer from data loss because of a catastrophic hardware failure. Instead, the data is stored in the cloud—in
powerful, geographically redundant data centers run by major corporations we actually trust—and is always accessible from any PC or ...
