Microsoft will hold its annual developer conference in San Francisco this week. The company has promised to showcase some features that will "freak" us out. Wondering what these surprising features could be? Microsoft has published its full list of sessions, promising an exciting event for the developers who have paid $2,195 each to attend the conference.
One of these major new features is an update to the signature Live Tiles. Microsoft introduced Live Tiles with Windows 8 in 2012, and many expect the company to finally bring some major changes to the Live Tiles. Details of this year's event hint at some possibilities for Live Tiles getting something new and surprising.
Notifications are an essential tool for engaging with your customers on Windows. We are building on the foundation of Action Center to give developers greatly increased flexibility in Adaptive Toasts. We will introduce a powerful API that enables a new class of apps to plug into the Notification pipeline and provide innovative experiences for users. Live Tiles are evolving with two highly-requested surprises that you won't want to miss.
While we will know more about these two surprises at the Build, earlier reports had revealed Microsoft working on a "hover" gesture and a "Mixview" user interface. Mixiview was later known as exploding Live Tiles where a user would tap on a tile to burst open a subset of tiles offering quick access shortcuts, similar to 3D Touch of iOS. Here's a two-year old video of Microsoft Research’s concept of interactive Live Tiles:
Windows 10 was expected to ship with interactive Live Tiles, and now users are waiting to see them when the next major Redstone updates start rolling out to the operating system later this year. It will be interesting to see exactly how the interactive Live Tiles would work in the newly released operating system. Would it be similar to Apple's 3D Touch, with different input methods? We will know once the conference starts on March 30, this week.
Windows 10 Redstone will bring updates to Notification Centre, Cortana, deeper integration between desktop and mobile operating system, and possibly interactive Live Tiles.
