Chapter 5: Bing News, Finance, Travel, Sports, Fitness, and Food
In This Chapter
Finding the Bing in everything
Getting a different slant on the news
Pinning finance for profit and fun
Taking your tablet with you while you travel
Working with the Sports, Fitness, and Food apps
Although the tiles may be scattered hither and yon on your Start screen, six of the key Microsoft Metro tiled apps are really just portals to viewing stuff that’s being fed by Microsoft Bing. In fact, by the time you read this, Microsoft may have even more Bing-y apps for you to install.
The Bing-based Metro apps are easy and cheap for Microsoft to assemble: Basically, what you see on the tiled Metro screen is, in each case, a wrapper around a web browser that’s set to work with the Bing search engine. The content is actually controlled by the Bing servers, and it’s pulled down to your screen when you ask for it.
Bing News delivers a very visual take on the latest news, with short articles that aren’t very touch-friendly. In this chapter, I show you how to personalize Bing News — there are several key options — but I also compare and contrast the Bing approach with the iPad Bing approach and the web Bing approach. I also toss in a bit of Flipboard, which may suit your fancy better than all the others. As of this writing, Flipboard doesn’t work on Windows. Android, yes. iPhone and iPad, yes. But not Windows.
In a similar vein, Bing Finance delivers colorful, picture-filled news reports and lots and lots of charts that, once again, aren’t very touch-friendly. In this chapter, I show you how to focus on stocks that concern you, track interest rates and other economic indicators, and explore a few other features, all the while repeating to myself that Microsoft wasn’t willing to spend the bucks to deliver real-time stock quotes.
I like Bing Travel, and in this chapter, I show you why. The photos, in particular, are stunning. (Wonder how they’d look on a retina display?) Unfortunately, much of the material is seriously out of date, but that’s why you have other travel apps, yes?
My friends tell me that Bing Sports is the greatest thing since live-streaming football games. (And those friends tend to think of “football” as what Americans call “soccer.”) Although it’s likely that other sporting outlets will have their own Windows 8.1 Metro tiled apps sooner or later, Microsoft’s Bing Sports packs a lot of information — and gorgeous pictures — into a compact frame.
In this chapter, I also pay a bit of lip service to the new Windows 8.1 Bing apps, Health & Fitness & Food & Drink. That’s two separate apps, but . . . oh, never mind. You’ll see.
Recognizing the Bing in Everyone
All six Microsoft Bing apps follow the same format:
A huge, high-definition photo on the front page. The front page photo is usually cycled onto the app’s Metro Start screen tile, with other photos also appearing.
Tiles for articles come in various sizes. (Bing Finance leads with a market graph, followed by the articles.) The individual articles obviously aren’t written for touch-enabled devices. You can’t even resize the text in them.
Each app has numerous customization options from stocks worth watching to favored news topics. Slide from the top or right-click the desktop to bring up these options.
The source of all the information inside the apps is Microsoft’s Bing. And Bing is culled and maintained by a human team inside Microsoft. The team may or may not bring items to the limelight that interest you.
The Microsoft Bing apps are just shells: They rely on their connection to Microsoft’s computers to come up with their content and perform their magic. That isn’t necessarily bad. But it does contribute to a sort of blandness that you won’t find if you go out on the web and find information in other ways.
Contrariwise, you aren’t going to see too many Bing articles about three-fingered aliens attacking dorms in Nantucket. Sometimes it’s good to have a content filter.
Reading the News with Bing
The Bing News app includes some remarkable customization options, making it one of the most advanced Windows 8.1 Metro tiled apps available to date.
Getting around Bing News
At its heart, Bing News is a wire-service aggregator, with a disproportionate representation of news stories sent by Reuters and the Associated Press (AP). As you scan through the news stories, you can see where they came from.
Let me take you on a guided tour:
1. Look at the News tile on the Start screen.
If you’ve used the News app at all while connected to the Internet, you see a picture that slides up and down, revolving with a one-sentence news description that actually matches the picture. See Figure 5-1.
If you’ve never used the News app, it’s just a blank tile with a picture and a little bit of text.
Figure 5-1: The News Start screen tile.
2. Tap or click the Bing News tile.
Bing News offers to take you on a tour, customize your news, add a section, or close the Get Started panel. Go through the tour (which is more like an ad, but what the heck). I’ll take you through customizing the news and adding a section. Then click or tap to get rid of the Get Started panel.
The Bing Daily appears with a full-screen high-definition photo associated with a top story. See Figure 5-2. This one’s an AP story.
Figure 5-2: The Bing Daily News top story appears as a full-screen picture.
3. Tap or click the story.
(Actually, you have to tap or click the text at the bottom of the picture, but close enough.)
Most stories run 500 to 1,000 words, typical for a print tabloid, and vastly superior to a typical radio or TV news blurb, but stunted for a “serious news” paper.
If you’re using a tablet, you immediately realize that the text can’t be pinched. The text size you see is what you get. But you can swipe to go from page to page. If you have a mouse, the scroll wheel doesn’t move the story up and down; it moves the story left to right.
4. Scroll to the right, to see the main categories offered in the Metro News app.
Depending on your location, you probably see three or four stories each in these categories: U.S., World, Sci/Tech, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Sports, and Health.
You can also pinch, or click the small minus sign in the lower-right corner, for a Semantic Zoom that shows you the sections, as shown in Figure 5-3.
Figure 5-3: A Semantic Zoom pinch brings up drab boxes for each of the Bing News Daily’s nine sections. (The Sources section is for picking news feeds.)
5. In your favorite web browser, go to www.bing.com/news.
Note the tabs at the top of the page in Figure 5-4. They’re almost identical to the sections in the Bing app.
Figure 5-4: The Bing News website mirrors the Bing News app — except the web app has more news, faster.
The overlap in categories emphasizes that the Bing News app is just a re-packaging of the Bing News site — but there’s more to it than that. Two concerns:
• The website packs a lot more information onto your screen at the expense of those huge high-def photos. Where the Windows 8.1 Metro tiled app shows just one top story, the website shows six or more.
• In weeks of testing, I didn’t see any breaking stories on the Bing News app until long after they appeared on the Bing News website. Usually, hot news items don’t appear in the Metro app until 12 hours or more after the news stories appeared on the Bing News site. Although the website’s stories get updated frequently, they rarely seem to be updated on the Bing News app.
6a. Grab your iPad, if you have one, install the Bing for iPad app (yep, it’s in the Apple App Store) and look at Bing News from the iPad point of view. See Figure 5-5.
6b. If you don’t have an iPad, skip to Step 8.
Figure 5-5: Bing — yes, the same Bing — as seen from an iPad.
Bing for iPad looks a little different, but it has several of the same categories. Tap the Weather tile, and you get an hourly and a ten-day forecast, just like the Bing Weather app. Tap the Finance tile, and you can put your choice of three stocks or indices on the screen.
7. On the iPad, tap the News tile at the bottom.
You get a full array of news stories (see Figure 5-6). Bing puts 24 stories on the screen, compared to the handful on the Metro tiled Bing News app. The pictures aren’t as nice, but the categories are similar, and it’s much easier to find a news story on the iPad.
8. Think about what you want from a news source.
Although Metro tiled Bing News has beautiful pictures, it has very few stories, the stories are dated, and they’re harder to find. The web version of Bing News is okay, and the iPad version is considerably better. But, frankly, I wouldn’t waste my time on any of them.
I like Flipboard (www.flipboard.com) for the iPad, iPhone, Android, and — by the time you read this — possibly for Windows 8.1's Metro tiled side, as well. Flipboard has a wider variety of sources than Bing News, its interface is much better, and it feels more like a news magazine and less like a tablet-size billboard. And it's free.
Figure 5-6: Bing News on the iPad.
Customizing Bing News
In the preceding section I stepped you through Bing Daily, which is the primary way of looking at Bing News. You may be surprised to discover that Bing News has other features, which may actually prove useful.
Here’s how to get to the rest of the story:
1. Bring up the Bing News app; then swipe from the top or bottom or right-click the app.
Four icons, as shown in Figure 5-7, appear. Each icon represents a different way of customizing the Metro Bing News app.
2. Tap or click the Bing News icon.
Bing News shows you shortcuts for the main headings that you have set up for your news. Figure 5-8 shows which headings are in effect if you haven’t changed anything. You can quickly shuffle over to World, Tech, Politics, Opinion, and so on.
Figure 5-7: The four, top, app bar icons have very different powers.
Figure 5-8: The Bing News button shows you shortcuts to the main news tabs.
3. Tap or click Topics.
Metro News takes you to a list of stories grouped by Topics. The only Topic already set up for you is about, cough, cough, Microsoft, as shown in Figure 5-9.
Figure 5-9: Topic News uses the same basic layout as the regular part of Bing News, but you supply the filters.
4. Tap or click one of the articles.
The main part of Bing News is touch-friendly: You move from screen to screen by sliding your finger from left to right and back, or by clicking on a slider down below. But the articles accessible from your custom Topics touch-friendly at all: The pages scroll from top to bottom, they don’t swipe from left to right, and they’re covered with ads. (And the text doesn’t resize or re-flow in either Bing News or Topic News.)
Why isn’t Topic News very touchy? Because you’re viewing the news site’s web page using the Metro tiled version of Internet Explorer. All the “wrapping” has been cut off so you can’t move around, but you’re definitely in Metro tiled IE. How can you tell? If you go to a news site that has some sort of blocked content (see Book IV, Chapter 1) — maybe a site on the Flash blacklist or one trying to run Silverlight — you see warnings that say videos can’t be viewed because you don’t have the correct version of the Flash player or Silverlight. It’s a bogus error message, but you’re still stuck. The only way to view the animation is to flip over to the desktop version of IE and try to find the same page — which can be challenging.
In some cases, the Topic News part of Bing News tells you that the article you chose can’t be viewed in the Bing News app and offers to send you off to your default browser. From there, you have to find your way back into Topic News, to pick up where you left off.
5. On the right, tap or click the Add a Topic box.
Bing News asks you to enter a news topic. Give it a try.
6. Type a topic, such as Dummies, and then tap or click Add.
Topic News puts together a tab for Dummies, as you can see in Figure 5-10.
7. Tap or click the left arrow next to Topics and then swipe or right-click the Bing News page to bring up the icons in Figure 5-7. Tap or click Sources.
Bing News brings up a list of all the news sources that it aggregates, broken out by the type of news, as shown in Figure 5-11.
8. Tap or click a news source.
A list of the most recent news stories from the source appears.
9. Tap on a story that you want to see.
This time you see a touch-friendly version of the story, but many of the stories are just short snippets.
Figure 5-10: A very disappoint-ing search for Dummies in the news.
Figure 5-11: You can see the latest news feeds from more than a hundred sources.
Moral of the story? Use a different news aggregator. There are many. I recommend Feedly (www.feedly.com) and use it over on the old-fashioned desktop side of the fence.
Or just work with a news site on the web — I use https://news.google.com/ all the time.
Pinning Finance for Fun and Profit
Unlike the Bing News app, the Bing Finance app doesn’t have any glaring usability problems.
Well, okay, you can’t pinch to make the text look bigger. It’s heavy on the U.S. stock exchanges and very light outside the United States. But other than that, Bing Finance is reasonably usable, and it can even pin stock market quotes to your Start screen.
Here’s a quick run-through:
1. On the Start screen, tap or click the Finance tile.
Like the Bing News app, the Bing Finance app opens with a gorgeous, high-definition photo, as shown in Figure 5-12.
On the right, take a minute to go through the Take a Tour option. When you’re done, click or tap Close.
If the markets are open, you may also see the major U.S. index ticker at the bottom of the picture.
2. Right-click or swipe from the bottom.
Bing Finance shows you a navigation bar (see Figure 5-13) that’s more than a little bit like the Metro Bing News bar. As with Metro News, you can tap on a source (the Wall Street Journal and so on) and see a list of the latest filed reports from that source.
Figure 5-12: Bing Finance splashes a gorgeous photo, no doubt to help you make good investment decisions.
Figure 5-13: Navigation in Bing Finance.
3. Back on the main Bing Finance screen (Figure 5-12), tap or click the lead story or one of the other stories.
You see a presentation identical to the one in the Bing News app.
Pages can’t be pinched to resize the text, but you can swipe to move pages. Unlike the Metro Bing News app, the Finance app pulls in stories from many top-notch sources.
4. Tap or click the left arrow next to the story headline and go back to the main screen. Scroll to the right.
Here’s what you see:
• Depending on your location and time of day, you may see a very capable, interactive graph of the major U.S. indices: DJIA, S&P 500, NASDAQ, and Russell 2000, with Day/Month/Week/Year tiles on the bottom. Tapping or hovering your mouse on a specific date or time brings up the index value, in blue, on the left.
• News: Shows just what it says — more news stories.
• More News From: Like the Metro Bing News Sources list, you can tap on a source (Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Kiplinger, and so on) and see the latest news stories from that source.
Of course, the Wall Street Journal has a paywall: You’re allowed to view a few articles every month and then you’re expected to pay. WSJ is notorious for its paywall, and the Metro Bing Business app won’t give you a magic key.
• Money: A collection of rather typical investment magazine style stories.
• Exchange and market rates: Currencies, Commodities, consumer borrowing and savings rates. Click or tap on any of the boxes and you see more detailed quotes.
• Tools: Mortgage calculator, auto payment amortization, currency converter, retirement planner, and so on.
• Ads: Golly, if you want to buy something from Microsoft, this app gives you the perfect opportunity.
5. Go back to the main Bing Finance screen (Figure 5-12), right-click it or swipe from the bottom. Then tap or click the Watchlist icon.
The Watchlist includes stocks, funds, and commodities — basically anything with a symbol — that you want to watch. It includes the following:
• A Watchlist of specific stocks: See Step 6.
• Gainers, Losers, and Most Active: By default, these are based on the NASDAQ. If you want to see Gainers, Losers, and Most Active for NYSE or Amex, tap or click the Market Movers headline. If you tap or click an individual stock, Bing Finance brings up full charts and news for the stock.
• Currencies, Commodities, Bonds, and ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds): You start with a summary. For more details, tap or click the topic that interests you. For example, tapping or clicking Currencies brings up a conversion matrix for many major currencies and a currency converter. Tapping or clicking Bonds brings up a chart of U.S. debt yield curves.
• Current nationwide average mortgage, savings, and credit card rates: Tap or click the Rates heading for auto loan rates, savings rates, and much more.
• Fund Picks: Highlights the top U.S.-registered fund performers in several categories. Tap or click the Fund Picks link, and you can slice and dice U.S. funds a hundred ways.
6. At the bottom of the list, tap or click the plus sign.
Bing Finance prompts you to add a company name or stock symbol to the Watchlist.
7. (Optional) Add a company name or stock symbol or just tap or click Close.
8. Slide the tile down just a bit, until a check mark appears in the upper-right corner, or right-click one of the stocks on the Watchlist.
The App bar appears on the bottom, as shown in Figure 5-14.
9. (Optional) To pin a tile for the stock to the Start screen, which shows the current price of the stock, tap or click Pin in the bottom-left corner.
The stock price appears on a (wide) Metro Start screen tile, and it’s updated throughout the day.
You can pin just about anything — an individual stock, an index, an exchange, exchange traded fund, or a fund list — to the Start screen using the same action.
Figure 5-14: Pin an individual stock to the Start screen.
Let me step you quickly through the rest of Bing Finance app’s App bar (Figure 5-13). Swipe from the top or bottom or right-click an empty space inside the app, and you see:
Market shows a snapshot of the leading market indices in seven countries worldwide. An indicator shows whether the markets are open. Click one of the indices, and you get a rolling, detailed price list for the latest day, week, month, year, or five years, as in Figure 5-15.
The Market tab also lists currency exchange rates, commodity prices, and best performing funds.
News shows an expanded news feed, which starts with a handful of news articles shown on the main page.
Money expands on the general-interest investment articles shown on the main page.
Videos is like a YouTube of financial clips, except not as focused. Lots of TV show clips.
Rates goes to the Rates section — mortgages, home equity, auto loans, money markets, CDs, credit cards.
Tools brings up the tools also listed at the right-most end of the main screen (refer to Figure 5-16).
Figure 5-15: Detailed trading charts for many of the world’s major markets.
Figure 5-16: These common calculators appear at the right end of the main screen or under the Tools icon.
Best of Web takes you to a list of a hundred financial websites, not unlike the Sources page in Bing News (refer to Figure 5-11). If you tap or click a site, your default browser opens at the site’s home page. It’s up to you to find your way back.
Traveling with Your Tablet
The Bing Travel app uses the same basic layout, with a much greater emphasis on pictures. See Figure 5-17.
I don’t know how the app picks a pic to put on the Start screen tile, but invariably, they’re gorgeous.
The main page, like all the other apps’ main pages, has a big photo on the left. Unlike the other main pages, you get many opportunities to spend money on the right side:
Tap or click the main photo, and you see a brief overview about the location, with a static map, exchange rate, current temperature, photos, and more. Tap or click the introduction, and you get a more detailed travel guide, usually from Frommer’s (although the source is likely to change by the time you read this, because Microsoft arch-rival Google bought Frommer’s).
Figure 5-17: Stunningly gorgeous photos in the Bing Travel app.
The Featured Destinations tiles behave similarly, except some of the travel guides are quite detailed — five pages long or more, with hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, and What to See lists. Tap or click the Featured Destinations heading to display the Destinations page, with hundreds of places to explore (see Figure 5-18).
Panoramas shows 360-degree stitches of locations in several cities. Most seem to be from www.360cities.net. The website has a much larger selection.
The Articles section carries a mixed bag of airline flight magazine-quality sketches interspersed with some real jewels, such as the culinary musings of Bizarre Foods guy Andrew Zimmern.
If you’re looking for some place in particular, use the Search box available in the upper-right corner of most pages. (No, the Search charm doesn’t work!)
The Metro Bing Travel app comes complete with — you guessed it — plenty of opportunities to book flights and hotel rooms, and otherwise part with your hard-earned cash. If you feel in the mood to part with some samolians, swipe from the top or bottom or right-click in the middle of the page to bring up the icons shown in Figure 5-19 (tell me if this is starting to look mighty familiar).
Figure 5-18: Destinations pack amazing photos with sometimes excellent commentary.
Figure 5-19: More opportun-ities to spend.
Here’s where the icons lead:
Destinations brings up the tiles of destinations (refer to Figure 5-17).
Flights puts you into a flight search from KAYAK.com (www.kayak.com). No doubt you've run flight searches before; this one's not significantly different. I got a big kick out of the offered routing of a flight from Phuket to Auckland via Guangzhou.
Hotels sets you in a hotel search, again powered by KAYAK.com. There's very little ancillary information — certainly nothing like the comprehensive reviews on TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com), for example, or the extensive price listings on LateStays.com (www.latestays.com).
Best of Web (like its namesake in the Bing Financial app and the Sources page in Bing News; refer to Figure 5-11) lists dozens of travel websites. If you tap or click a site, your default browser opens at the site’s home page. Ironically, you gotta find your own way back to the app.
If you think of the Bing Travel app as a gazetteer, as opposed to a serious destination research site like www.wikitravel.com or www.fodors.com, you won't be disappointed.
Sports Fans Everywhere, Take Note
Of the six Bing-driven apps, Bing Sports consistently receives the highest accolades.
Like the others, when you open the app you see a gorgeous (well, given the subject matter, maybe not exactly gorgeous, but certainly well crafted) high-resolution photo (see Figure 5-20).
Figure 5-20: Like the other Bing apps, Sports starts with a biiiig picture.
Scroll to the right, and you see the Scoreboard, which contains detailed reviews of just about every game of just about every type that you could want — just click or tap on the game that interests you. (Hint: If you want to add another team or sport, keep scrolling!)
Scroll a bit farther, and you see:
Top Stories the newsy stuff.
Headlines are the text version of the Top Stories.
Favorite Teams lets you put your own teams on the lists. And there are a lot of teams.
Favorite Sports swaps out the Scoreboard for whatever you choose, and the choices are amazing. NASCAR Sprint Cup? NASCAR Nationwide? It’s all here. You can choose from NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Golf, Formula 1, Premier League, and La Liga. The selection changes with your location, and I’m told that AFL (that’s Ozzie football to you sissy Yanks) and maybe even Rugby (give blood — play ruggers) are on the horizon.
The inevitable Videos and Slideshows make an appearance, too — news for those who don’t want to read.
Here’s the chest buster: Tap or click one of the team tiles, and you see an enormous array of information about the team: a high-definition photo-backed top story, news stories, played games and results, a roster of players with an enormous array of statistics — just about everything you could imagine about the team. See Figure 5-21.
If you tap or click a game, Bing Sports brings up the Fox Sports listing for the game. Yes, Fox has listings for European matches as well as MLB GameTrax and all the others.
Swipe from the top or bottom or right-click the main page, and you see the array of icons in Figure 5-22.
Figure 5-21: Each team gets an enormous collection of statistics.
Figure 5-22: Direct access to all the major leagues.
From the icons, you can fly directly to the league that interests you or, as in the other Metro Bing apps, look for references in the Best of Web section.
The Two New Metro Bing Apps
If you’ve followed along this far, no doubt you’ve seen a certain, uh, similarity in how all the Metro Bing apps work. I bet it won’t surprise you one little bit to know that if you right-click or swipe on the main screen of the Metro Bing Food & Drink app, you see an array of icons like the one in Figure 5-23.
The Metro Bing Food & Drink app makes it easy to look up recipes from a rather small database. I got a big kick out of the recipe for Thai Steamed Red Snapper Fillets with Brown Rice and Thai Sauce. (Thailand doesn’t have red snapper — but never mind.)
There’s a hands-free mode available on each recipe that lets you leaf through the pages by voice command. I never could get it to work very well. Probably have the wrong accent.
Similarly, the Metro Bing Health & Fitness app, which has icons like the ones shown in Figure 5-24.
Figure 5-23: The main Food & Drink page.
Figure 5-24: Big tip to improve your health and fitness: Get away from your computer.
The 3D Human Body section of the app is quite useful and interesting. From Healthline Networks, Inc., the rotatable (but not zoomable or pinchable) 3D rendering is quite impressive. I think the free Google 3D Human Body Browser (http://google-body-browser.en.softonic.com/web-apps) does a lot more, however.