This works well for lightweight notifications such as new messages from other users (email & social networking), new discounts on a shopping site, new articles on a newsfeed etc.
Windows 8 can poll for updates for pinned tiles on the Start screen.
Badge Notifications That Update In the Background It can also convert an image to the icon file format (. Use it to create the 32×32 icon for your site. One tool for creating icons is x-icon editor. IE10 extracts the dominant color from the icon and automatically uses it as the background color for the Start screen tile. IE10 uses the large site icon (32 x 32 pixels) to identify the site when pinned to the Start screen the same way that IE9 used it for pinning to the task bar. Site-Centric Visual on the Pinned Site TileĪs a Web developer, you can provide a site icon ( favicon) that IE10 uses throughout the browser to represent the site, in the address bar, on the new tab page, and on the Start screen. The following two screen shots illustrate pinned site tiles and badge notifications. In Windows 8 the experience for consumers is even better with site tile updates, even when you don’t have the site open in the browser. We found that sites that used this feature with IE9 on Windows 7 see anywhere from a 15 percent to 50 percent increase in site visits. With badge notifications, site tiles come alive with up-to-date information and help you know when new content is available.ĭevelopers can utilize pinned sites to better connect their site with their users and promote their site’s brand directly in the Windows start screen. Pinned sites on Windows 8 make it fast and easy to immediately get to your sites.
I’ll also walk through the few lines of code you need take your site from looking like the left tile…to the right tile here:Ĭonsumers on Windows spend most of their time on the Web and we know from Windows opt-in telemetry (officially, the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program), that they go back to the same set of sites time and again.
This articles shows you how to put your site logo right next to apps on the Windows 8 Start Screen-complete with site-centric visuals and badge notifications to let you know there is new content. We’ve written about the Internet Explorer 10 browsing experience on Windows 8. App tiles are alive with activity and show you fresh and tailored content so you know what’s new in your world. If you're interested in the Live Tiles, check out Creating and managing tiles, toast, and Windows push notifications.The Windows 8 Start screen is the best place to find and stay connected to all your favorite apps and content. Live Tiles are the same size as the Logo and Wide Logo, use an image if you want, but have an extra layer of special sauce applied to them. Double-clicking this file opens the manifest editor, where we can visually configure the icons: Note that these are all static tiles.
The image below shows the three types of tile logos (Logo, Wide Logo and Small Logo): The icons used by our application need to be packaged as local resources, and are configured in the package.appxmanifest file. Below are the sizes and usage for each of the logo types: ico format files are no more-icons in Windows 8 are either. Each of these icons takes a particular size file and has a specific use. For Windows 8 applications, there are three possible tiles (not including a Live Tile), a badge icon, and a splash screen we can customize.
One important consideration in the UI design of our Metro-style app is the icons used to identify our application.