With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft introduced us to a new kind of user interface: Live Tiles. This new UI metaphor provides a couple of benefits to developers: first they can update the tile on a regular basis to provide visible up-to-date information, and second they can better organize the main entry point into their apps. The user experience is much improved: users don't have to run the app to see the latest most important information and there is only one entry point into the app (the tile itself). In the past year, we even introduced a complete set of controls (TileControl) so you may expose this user interface in your own desktop apps.
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Despite this, there is a bit of a disconnect between the Windows 8 Tiles on the Start Screen and your non-Modern-UI desktop apps. Bridging this disconnect is exactly where the new WinRTLiveTileManager comes in.
The idea is simple, although the execution is a little more involved: implement a desktop app that can create and display (and update, of course) Live Tiles on the Start Screen, such that when the user clicks on them, the desktop app is invoked and will respond. To accomplish this, we will ship a fully-compliant Windows Store App, the Live Tile Manager.
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The Live Tile Manager will analyze the running desktop apps seeing if they support the Live Tile Manager interface. For each found, it will collect the one or more tiles exposed by the app and pin them to the Start Screen.
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It will also respond to clicks or touches on these tiles and route the event to the relevant app on the desktop.
For example, here is a Live Tile on the Start Scrren that has been created and is updated in real time from a desktop app:
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Let me know what you think…
Cheers,
Azret
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