Desktop Context Menus and Fast Actions - What a Long Press Opens

Touch and hold any square on the desktop and a menu opens that matches what you're holding.

A resource or channel square opens the same menu the main app offers for that item: for a resource, open it, play it, add another shortcut, edit it, copy it, export it, share access to it, rescan it or delete it; for a channel, pin it, add a shortcut, share its link, or remove it. Both menus come from one shared list the app keeps for each kind of item, so the desktop and the main window never drift apart, and the same confirmation guards a destructive action either way.

An App functions square - Streams, Quick Camera, Network Monitor and the rest - opens a shorter menu: Open, Settings where the feature has one, Pin to taskbar, and Remove from desktop.

Some squares reach further than opening themselves. A square pinned to a quick-access panel route opens that panel directly, and a square pinned to a scheduled operation asks you to confirm, then runs the job in the background - a backup you can start with one long press instead of digging through settings.

Starting a brand-new resource - a folder, a cloud account, a network share - no longer means leaving the desktop first.

Touch and hold an empty square and tap Add resource, or, while adding My resource from the ordinary add-item picker, tap Add resource.. at the bottom of the list. Either opens the app's usual resource-creation screen; finish it and the new resource's shortcut lands on the desktop by itself. Cancelling leaves nothing behind, and on a home screen that won't accept a pinned shortcut the resource is still created - the app just says so.

Every resource you create this way, or from the main window, lands in the desktop's Resources section automatically, and that section keeps its own Add resource square at the end, so you're never short of an empty one to start the next.

A resource's square shows its real face on the desktop and the taskbar: the icon you picked for it, or its virtual-folder or cloud-provider glyph, layered with a small badge for how it connects - cloud, network or local - instead of one generic icon per resource type. Turn on a media type later, say All Images, and its own aggregate square appears in Resources by itself, without touching anything else you've arranged.

The App functions squares keep themselves current too: switching a feature on adds its square there at once, in both the upright and sideways layout, and switching it off removes that square again - one you removed by hand stays gone either way. Installing a real app adds one automatic square of its own to the desktop; uninstalling it removes only that automatic square, never one you placed yourself.

Share a contact with the launcher and it becomes a square that keeps working for that person, without asking for your address book up front.

Pin a contact from the add-item picker and choose what the square does: open their Contact card, Call them, Send SMS, or open Message in an app to jump straight into a messenger conversation. Call and SMS are hidden on a device with no telephony. The app reads the contact once, from the entry you pick in the system contact picker, and keeps a snapshot on the square - no contacts permission is needed just to pin one, and calling always goes through the number you actually chose. Until a photo is on file, or if you never grant the permission below, the square shows the person's initials over a color that stays theirs.

Pinning a messenger square first asks Which app should open the chat? so you pick the app before the person; an Any app row keeps the older order of person-then-app, and the question is skipped when only one messenger is installed. If the person turns out to have no chat in the app you picked, the square's error message says which app that was.

Want the square to stay current when someone changes their photo or gets renamed? Grant the contacts permission when the app asks, right as you pin the square. Refuse and the square keeps working from the snapshot taken at pin time, which also stands in if the contact is later deleted or can't be read.

Share a location from any map app while the launcher is turned on, and Add place to launcher appears in the share sheet next to your other sharing choices. Tap it, and a square lands on the desktop that opens turn-by-turn navigation to that spot, ready to start driving the moment you tap it.

A shared short link is resolved to real coordinates while the square is created, so opening it later needs no network. When a link can't be resolved, the square is still created and simply shows the place as shared.

A channel can sit on the desktop as more than a shortcut. Choose Stream in the add-item picker, or long-press a channel square and choose Add window to desktop, and you get a Stream window: a radio channel shows its name, icon and a play/pause button; a video channel gets a larger square, at least 3x2, with the picture itself paused on the last frame until you press play - nothing starts on its own.

Tap a playing video window and corner controls fade in for a moment: play/pause, mute, stop, fullscreen and picture-in-picture. Fullscreen and picture-in-picture both hand off to the full player, which can collapse back into a small floating window on request.

Adding a channel square before you've saved any channels opens Settings, Streams instead of an empty list, so there's always somewhere to go. Picking a channel for any of these squares stays quick even with a very long list: only the icons on screen get loaded, a big catalog asks for a search word or a topic first, and an empty result says so instead of leaving a spinner on screen. The same fast picker also serves the channel choosers of the Legacy and VR editions, which use it outside the launcher desktop.

YouTube channel window works the same idea for a channel you follow there: name it or paste its address, and its square - at least 3x2 - shows the channel name and the cover of its latest upload, silent until you tap it, then plays that video right inside the square through YouTube's own player. Where the device can't host that player, the square opens the channel in the YouTube app instead.

Google Maps Live Frame puts an interactive map, not a screenshot, on the desktop: pan and zoom it like the map app itself, right from the square.

A few squares do small jobs well, right where you are.

The Translator square translates typed or pasted text fully offline, through the bundled engine; its caption shows the language pair and doubles as a button to change it. It says plainly when a language pack is still missing rather than failing quietly.

The Now Playing gadget starts out showing this app's own playback, the same as ever. Turn on notification access from a button on the gadget itself - behind a plain-language explanation of what that grants - and it follows and controls whatever is playing in any app instead, falling back to FastMediaSorter's own playback whenever nothing else is. It draws the cover art the playing app publishes, falls back to that app's icon when there is none, and a tap on the card opens whichever app is currently playing.

The weather square's Unit system - metric or US measurements - lives in Settings, General, and without you touching it the square already shows Fahrenheit on a device set to the United States, Liberia or Myanmar, and Celsius everywhere else, read from the device's region rather than its language. The city you picked for it is remembered on its own, so resetting the launcher to defaults brings the weather back already showing your city instead of asking again.