Charms may not be as ubiquitous in our daily lives as Windows and Office, but they may soon be with the onset of Windows 8 machines about. Microsoft describes “charms” as the menu of icons and commands invoked by flicking from the right edge on tablets, or by pointing the mouse pointer to the lower left corner of the screen.
It’s only a matter of time before “charms” are described sans quotation marks, thanks to a new trademark application by Microsoft filed a day before the BUILD Conference. The application, spotted by TechCrunch (via Geekwire), was filed on September 12 and describes the trademark in an computing context:
The charms, in their current state, contain five commands: Settings, Devices, Share, Search, and Start. Settings exposes the current Metro application’s preferences, plus a notification dashboard containing volume, network, brightness, and power widgets. Devices contains the devices currently attached to the system, including printers. Applications can register themselves as sharing “contracts” via the Share command. The Search command acts similarly to the search bar in Windows Vista and 7′s Start menu. And finally, the Start button invokes the new Start screen.
