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A closer look at the Windows Start Menu

At BUILD last week, Microsoft demoed the new Start menu that will be coming to Windows 8.1 and we thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at what was shown off so that we can have a better understanding what to expect when it arrives.

We cut up the keynote announcement to highlight the Start menu announcement and you can see a few features of the menu that were not explicitly discussed but were shown in the video.

For starters, adding live tiles to the menu can be accomplished by dragging a modern app from the list on the left in to the ‘modern’ area. The ‘modern’ area of the Start menu is also adjustable in terms of how wide it is, as you can clearly see in the video.

You will also be able to adjust the live tile sizes and layouts in the Start menu as well, which will provide you another location to create your perfect application layout.

Finally, the vertical height of the Start menu can be adjusted too. As shown in the video, when the modern apps were added to the first column, it grew in height.

Of course, it is important to note that this is an early build of the Start menu and anything could change before it is released to consumers.

As for when it will be released, Terry Myerson only says that it will be coming to all Windows 8.1 users in a future update, but a hard date was not provided. Now that the Start menu cat is out of the bag, we can only hope that Microsoft will be more forthcoming about when it will finally be released.

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