Chapter Four: Live tiles

Metro UI of windows 8 & 8.1 is really appealing & introduction of live tiles is a great step MSFT took; a novice in Windows app development must know about the concept of live tiles.

Let’s begin to learn this interesting & exciting concept of live tiles with me.

Have happy learning :)

Live tiles:

• A tile is an app's representation on the Start screen. A tile allows we to present rich and engaging content to user on Start
• When app is not running, tapping or clicking the tile launches the app.

Tiles come in three sizes:           

• Square (Small)

• Medium  
• Wide (large)

Here Store tile is small tile & Weather is Wide tile & we can re size them by right clicking them.

• In one corner, a tile can optionally show branding, as the app's name or a small logo image.
• Tiles can be live (updated through notifications) or we can leave them static. Tiles begin as a default tile, defined in the app's manifest. A static tile will always display the default content, which is generally a full-tile logo image

Two very important points to always remember:

• If we use a wide tile, the user can resize the tile from wide to square or square to wide at any time. We don't know which size is currently displayed.
• The user can turn tile notifications off and on at any time.

Default tile and tile size

Each app has a default tile. This is the tile that the user sees when they first install our app. The default tile logo image represents our app logo or other branding so users can clearly identify the app.

By:

Khushbu Wadhwani,

Senior Windows app developer,

References:MSDN,Microsoft developer forum