WP7 Mango In Depth - Live Tiles

# Exploring Windows Phone 7: A Deep Dive into Live Tiles

## Introduction

Windows Phone 7 introduced a revolutionary feature known as "live tiles," which quickly became one of its standout features. These dynamic tiles provide users with real-time information and updates directly on the home screen, offering a unique and interactive experience. In this article, we will take an in-depth look at Windows Phone 7's live tiles, exploring their functionality, customization options, and the wealth of information they offer.

## The Lock Screen and Initial Impressions

Before diving into the live tiles, it's worth mentioning the lock screen, which provides a glimpse of what's to come. The lock screen displays essential information such as the time, date, day, and any calendar events, such as birthdays or other important dates. Additionally, it shows the number of unread emails, giving users an immediate overview of their inbox status.

When you unlock the phone, you are greeted with a clean and minimalistic interface, dominated by live tiles. These tiles are designed to provide quick access to various apps and services while offering real-time updates. The design is both functional and visually appealing, though some users might find it cluttered, while others appreciate the abundance of information at their fingertips.

## Exploring Live Tiles

Live tiles are one of the defining features of Windows Phone 7, and they come in different forms depending on the app or service they represent. Here's a closer look at some of the key live tiles demonstrated:

### Messaging Hub

The messaging tile displays incoming messages, showing the number of unread messages. Tapping on this tile opens the messaging app, allowing users to read and send messages directly from their home screen.

### People Hub

The people hub is another dynamic tile that updates with recent activity from your contacts. It can pull information from various sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. For example, if a friend you follow on Twitter posts something new, their face might appear on this tile, indicating they have something to share.

### Weather App

The weather tile provides up-to-date forecasts, often with a visual representation of the map. In Aaron's case, it showed "mostly cloudy" conditions at 52°F, giving a clear snapshot of the current weather without needing to open the app fully.

### Music Hub

The music tile displays the last artist you listened to, scrolling their name across the tile. This feature adds a personal touch, reminding users of their recent listening habits.

### Email and LinkedIn

These tiles provide quick access to your email inbox and LinkedIn updates. The email tile alerts you to new messages, while LinkedIn keeps you informed about professional connections and activity.

### Bible News and Other Apps

In addition to the core apps, Aaron demonstrated a variety of other live tiles, including Bible news, pictures, Internet Explorer, Xbox Live, his own website, Marketplace, calendar, eBay, Home Depot, and local Scout. Each tile offers unique functionality, from reading Bible updates to tracking eBay auctions or monitoring your gaming profile on Xbox Live.

## Customization

One of the standout features of live tiles is their customizability. Users can rearrange, pin, and unpin tiles according to their preferences. For example, Aaron showed how he could tap and hold a tile to move it up or down, adjusting the layout to suit his needs. This flexibility allows users to create a home screen that perfectly aligns with their lifestyle and interests.

## Additional Features

### Newsreader Integration

Aaron highlighted a newsreader app (Pulse) as an example of how third-party apps can integrate with live tiles. By pinning this tile, he could quickly access the latest news without navigating deep into the phone's menu.

### App Updates

The Marketplace tile keeps users informed about available updates for their installed apps. Aaron demonstrated how selecting these updates would trigger a download in the background, keeping his apps up to date without disrupting his workflow.

## Personal Opinions and Comparisons

While Aaron appreciates the minimalistic design of Windows Phone 7, he admitted that he often finds himself switching between his Samsung Focus (Windows Phone) and an iPhone. Despite this, he remains impressed by the interface's ability to deliver relevant information efficiently.

He also expressed hope for more developers to create apps that fully leverage live tiles' potential. While some apps like the weather app excel in providing real-time updates, there is room for improvement across the broader app ecosystem.

## Conclusion and Call to Action

Windows Phone 7's live tiles represent a significant leap forward in smartphone interfaces, offering users a wealth of information in a clean and intuitive package. Whether you're checking the weather, staying connected with friends, or managing your email, these tiles provide quick access to essential tools and updates.

If you have any thoughts on how live tiles could be improved or if there are apps you feel make exceptional use of this feature, Aaron encourages you to share your opinions in the comments below. Additionally, don't forget to subscribe to his channel for more insightful videos.

Thank you for reading, and we'll see you next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone this is Aaron for zolote and we're going to take an in-depth look at Windows Phone 7 and its live tiles let's go ahead and turn it on here now let's swipe up but before we do that this is the lock screen it gives you a little bit of information on the front and what we have is the time the day the date and anything that's in your calendar so in this case it's uh this individual's birthday and we also have six email messages let's go ahead and open the phone up here and we've got our live tiles in front of us now live tiles are something you either love or you hate and in most cases I think people like this there's a lot of information going on right here in a very simple and straightforward and minimalistic way and what we have here in my case is our messaging Hub our people Hub our phone dialer a weather app from The Weather Channel we also have our music we have my email my linked inboxes we also have another app we have another app this is uh Bible news we have pictures Internet Explorer Xbox Live uh a live tile of my own website that I've made here the marketplace calendar eBay Home Depot local Scout and me or new items relating to me so let's go ahead and take a look at the tiles themselves now what we have in each tile is related to what it actually is so here we have messaging well those will be my messages they'll show a number similar to this if I have a message on the right here we have the people Hub and you can see different things are spinning around and those people either are relatives friends on Facebook or perhaps people on Twitter I did see Don McAllister in there from screencast online and uh he's someone that I listen to regularly and he was in here and I follow him on Twitter so his face showed up here because he must have posted something recently so we can go into this and I've shown this tile before but we can go into it and you can see there's some news from Chris Perillo some other people I'm not going to go over that Hub but you can see those are more recent posts related to the tile itself and it's just giving me a clear-cut view of what's actually going on right now here you can see the weather it's actually giving me a map of my area and that there's nothing going on it just says mostly cloudy 52° which isn't too bad this time of year so as we can see there it is it's flipping around and showing me the map music does something similar uh that it takes the actual artist that you last listened to and places them into the tile so if I go into here I'm not sure which artist this is in the background uh it looks like fly leaf so fly leaf is in the background they must have been the last person I listened to on the Windows Phone 7 or on my Samsung Focus here and so it's showing them scrolling across here to let me know that's who it is I kind of like the live tiles updating as far as the linked inboxes are concerned that's pretty self-explanatory and you can see there's six email messages if I go into the email messages even if I don't read them it's going to say my password's incorrect even if I don't read them go back to home it just clears them and says oh you've actually you were aware there were six email messages you must not care anymore so I'm going to delete that when anything new comes in it will pop into place right there uh as far as tiles go here these really don't update pictures update and pictures are showing pictures taken from either the ones that came on the phone something more recent on Facebook or it could just be some wallpapers I've downloaded so that image I'm not really sure where it's from but there it is Internet Explorer really doesn't do a whole lot Xbox Live is updating with my gamer tag or my actual app avatar from my gamer tag uh which is Big z a lot of you have actually friended me I do run out of friend requests so I apologize if you're not able to get in but if I'm online feel free to to uh message me or talk to me in a party down here Marketplace this is showing that I have two updates you can see down here two updates and there's updates let's go ahead and update that allow it we're waiting it'll download and we'll do that in the background scroll back down here you can see this is my calendar it's updating the calendar this is updating uh eBay or the Home Depot if I was watching something or bidding on something Home Depot I haven't really seen a whole lot of action from that as far as live tiles are concerned as far as local Scout that's pretty much it and 17 new items related to me uh this could be notifications from Twitter it could be a number of different things uh but you get the idea now the neat thing with live tiles is we can change them over over here I actually have a bunch of different apps and in these apps I can move them over so here I have a pulse newsreader if I tap and hold I can pin it to the start uninstall rate and review let's pin it to start and it places at the bottom well if I don't want it at the bottom I can tap and hold and move it up slide it all the way to the top I can move it down here tap and it will lock it in place you can do that with any one of these tiles so if you don't like the layout I have you can easily change that just like this maybe I want this one over here over here you get the idea if I want to unpin this one I can simply tap get rid of it I want to move this back up and lock it into place very simple very nice and looks great let's go ahead and move over here now not everything updates live tiles regularly I'm really hoping developers uh the 40,000 apps that are out there we get some more with some really good live tiles going on it would be great to see that so as you can see live tiles are pretty handy I wanted to show you that a little bit this is the home screen with some more information at top when you don't want it it gets out of your way very minimalistic very nice very clean uh there are some people that say this looks very cluttered uh in my opinion it doesn't it looks great gives me the information I need really quickly and here it is I do use an iPhone normally uh but I go back and forth because I really like this interface it's very nice minimalistic and a great little addition uh to the same old icons uh that you've now you've got some updated information and it really lets you know what's going on and gives you the information you tend to care about in my opinion so for any of you that have any suggestions for live tiles that may have used Windows Phone 7 or use it regularly uh that present you with some really great information please go ahead and comment below and let me know what you think or what you think the best application that uses the live tile might be I think weather does a pretty good job of it but there are some others out there that do probably a better job of it and I'm just not aware there's so many applications now in the App Store that it's it's tough to really know so let me know what you think is is a great use of the live tile as always if you if you haven't subscribed please go ahead and hit that subscribe button thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next timehi everyone this is Aaron for zolote and we're going to take an in-depth look at Windows Phone 7 and its live tiles let's go ahead and turn it on here now let's swipe up but before we do that this is the lock screen it gives you a little bit of information on the front and what we have is the time the day the date and anything that's in your calendar so in this case it's uh this individual's birthday and we also have six email messages let's go ahead and open the phone up here and we've got our live tiles in front of us now live tiles are something you either love or you hate and in most cases I think people like this there's a lot of information going on right here in a very simple and straightforward and minimalistic way and what we have here in my case is our messaging Hub our people Hub our phone dialer a weather app from The Weather Channel we also have our music we have my email my linked inboxes we also have another app we have another app this is uh Bible news we have pictures Internet Explorer Xbox Live uh a live tile of my own website that I've made here the marketplace calendar eBay Home Depot local Scout and me or new items relating to me so let's go ahead and take a look at the tiles themselves now what we have in each tile is related to what it actually is so here we have messaging well those will be my messages they'll show a number similar to this if I have a message on the right here we have the people Hub and you can see different things are spinning around and those people either are relatives friends on Facebook or perhaps people on Twitter I did see Don McAllister in there from screencast online and uh he's someone that I listen to regularly and he was in here and I follow him on Twitter so his face showed up here because he must have posted something recently so we can go into this and I've shown this tile before but we can go into it and you can see there's some news from Chris Perillo some other people I'm not going to go over that Hub but you can see those are more recent posts related to the tile itself and it's just giving me a clear-cut view of what's actually going on right now here you can see the weather it's actually giving me a map of my area and that there's nothing going on it just says mostly cloudy 52° which isn't too bad this time of year so as we can see there it is it's flipping around and showing me the map music does something similar uh that it takes the actual artist that you last listened to and places them into the tile so if I go into here I'm not sure which artist this is in the background uh it looks like fly leaf so fly leaf is in the background they must have been the last person I listened to on the Windows Phone 7 or on my Samsung Focus here and so it's showing them scrolling across here to let me know that's who it is I kind of like the live tiles updating as far as the linked inboxes are concerned that's pretty self-explanatory and you can see there's six email messages if I go into the email messages even if I don't read them it's going to say my password's incorrect even if I don't read them go back to home it just clears them and says oh you've actually you were aware there were six email messages you must not care anymore so I'm going to delete that when anything new comes in it will pop into place right there uh as far as tiles go here these really don't update pictures update and pictures are showing pictures taken from either the ones that came on the phone something more recent on Facebook or it could just be some wallpapers I've downloaded so that image I'm not really sure where it's from but there it is Internet Explorer really doesn't do a whole lot Xbox Live is updating with my gamer tag or my actual app avatar from my gamer tag uh which is Big z a lot of you have actually friended me I do run out of friend requests so I apologize if you're not able to get in but if I'm online feel free to to uh message me or talk to me in a party down here Marketplace this is showing that I have two updates you can see down here two updates and there's updates let's go ahead and update that allow it we're waiting it'll download and we'll do that in the background scroll back down here you can see this is my calendar it's updating the calendar this is updating uh eBay or the Home Depot if I was watching something or bidding on something Home Depot I haven't really seen a whole lot of action from that as far as live tiles are concerned as far as local Scout that's pretty much it and 17 new items related to me uh this could be notifications from Twitter it could be a number of different things uh but you get the idea now the neat thing with live tiles is we can change them over over here I actually have a bunch of different apps and in these apps I can move them over so here I have a pulse newsreader if I tap and hold I can pin it to the start uninstall rate and review let's pin it to start and it places at the bottom well if I don't want it at the bottom I can tap and hold and move it up slide it all the way to the top I can move it down here tap and it will lock it in place you can do that with any one of these tiles so if you don't like the layout I have you can easily change that just like this maybe I want this one over here over here you get the idea if I want to unpin this one I can simply tap get rid of it I want to move this back up and lock it into place very simple very nice and looks great let's go ahead and move over here now not everything updates live tiles regularly I'm really hoping developers uh the 40,000 apps that are out there we get some more with some really good live tiles going on it would be great to see that so as you can see live tiles are pretty handy I wanted to show you that a little bit this is the home screen with some more information at top when you don't want it it gets out of your way very minimalistic very nice very clean uh there are some people that say this looks very cluttered uh in my opinion it doesn't it looks great gives me the information I need really quickly and here it is I do use an iPhone normally uh but I go back and forth because I really like this interface it's very nice minimalistic and a great little addition uh to the same old icons uh that you've now you've got some updated information and it really lets you know what's going on and gives you the information you tend to care about in my opinion so for any of you that have any suggestions for live tiles that may have used Windows Phone 7 or use it regularly uh that present you with some really great information please go ahead and comment below and let me know what you think or what you think the best application that uses the live tile might be I think weather does a pretty good job of it but there are some others out there that do probably a better job of it and I'm just not aware there's so many applications now in the App Store that it's it's tough to really know so let me know what you think is is a great use of the live tile as always if you if you haven't subscribed please go ahead and hit that subscribe button thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time\n"