Live Tiles have been a signature feature of the Windows OS interface since the launch of Windows 8. But these colorful, info-packed squares appear to be on their way into the trash bin.
This should’ve been obvious to anyone who’s been keeping an eye on Windows development. Live tiles were amazing on Windows Phone, but never really fit desktop computing. I’m glad they’re going away.
Live tiles have been awful on every platform. At best they are a limited version of widgets available on android (albeit with stronger restrictions on the look which is nice considering how its the wild west on android); at worst they were distracting and used to advertise things users didn’t want.
Agreed they do not fit at all on windows 10. But even on windows 9 with full screen displays of these things, they were more annoying than anything else. Yes, it was great that they updated with real information ( good!). But half the freaking time it was just a color tile with a description of information that would show up there like “news” or “weather”. I just wanted them to be mostly static ( not flipping between useless category information, and actual useful information).
Can widgets be a thing again on desktops, now that these are dying? I’d like first party widgets on windows, with the ability to hover over all windows.
> Can widgets be a thing again on desktops, now that these are dying?
If I remember correctly, Windows 7 did support widget and even allocate some space on screen only for those widgets. As I know, both Windows 8.x and Windows 10 does not have widget support.
> I’d like first party widgets on windows, with the ability to hover over all windows.
And when I read a webpage/ PDF, the widget would block part of the text and I need to move the widget. With Live Tiles, I can open Start menu, get the small piece information I want (schedule, temperature, etc.), close the Start menu, and continue my reading without worrying a widget would block the text on the screen.
But I have to press something to see the info. and the startmenu goes over everything too. Maybe I want something closer to what I think windows 7 had that weird side pannel that would show up. But I’d like it to resize all the other data so I can still see the web content/ ide / terminal screens I have up.
Thinking about this more, what I think I really want is a tiling window manager. Anyone have any experience with the windows ones? Or are thy just a cluster thats best to avoid if possible?
Widgets never went away (despite Yahoo! killing Konfabulator on Mac, and Google killing their widgets on desktops) if you know where to look: https://www.rainmeter.net/
Nice to have a proper clock, weather, and nerdy performance meters on my desktop all the time, and without the stupid whitespace-focused Fluent (or whatever it’s called this month) flat design.
Does this mean I’ll finally be able to set the small tile size as default when I pin something to the start menu?
I agree with Thom. On WinPhone 8.1+ live tiles were very useful, much better than silly almost useless alert numbers or exclamation marks other platforms deliver it a sticky and persistent way. It delivered the ability for the user to self-determine the worth of a notification without needing to drill down into a waste of time. I’d probably extend that Live Tile to potentially being useful on some touchscreen / tablet interfaces, but as tablets become more powerful the need for Live Tiles are diminished.
In a desktop live tiles are next to useless because you nearly always just a click or Kb shortcut away from the full application.
As Bill SoB states, widgets can be much more useful in a desktop OS, but a lot of developers write them off as bling. I’ve often longed for a decent alternative to Conky with customization of alerts. Modern desktops have all that RAM and often nothing to use it for!
> Modern desktops have all that RAM and often nothing to use it for!
Funny that when application(s) occupy a lot of memory (e.g. Google Chrome), people start to panic. The real problem is that those Electron-based applications consume a lot of memory AND making the system unresponsive.
> but never really fit desktop computing.
I disagree.
With Live Tiles, I can open Start menu and check (1) the title and part of the content of the latest e-mail, (2) upcoming events in the calendar, and (3) weather. While (1) may not be important and/ or useful, (2) and (3) are handy.
Without Live Tiles, I need to open Calendar, wait for the application to load, and check the schedule. Then, open a weather application, wait, and check the weather (or open a browser, wait, search “weather” in a search engine, wait, and check the weather).
It is a shame that I am forever explaining to younger people (I sound like some sort of fossil …) how good Live Tiles were on Windows Phone. They were and, unless Apple or Google have a sea-change in approach, will be the best way of conveying a lot of information clearly, and that Microsoft completely botched up the platform was disastrous as it left a duopoly, never mind inferior user interfaces.
On Windows 10? Almost the first thing I do on a new install is delete all the Live Tiles and drag the right-hand edge of the Start Menu as far left as it can go.
I get that they were useful on a phone, especially if you were the kind of person that arranges them just right.
I never liked the way they looked though. To me a Windows Phone home screen was always a mess of randomly ordered, sized and colored tiles. Some of them had notifications in them, some of them had pieces of the wallpaper, others yet, app icons with random colors. They were flipping and moving to grab attention and I could never stand that noise. So, yeah, I’m glad they are finally going away…
How long will they waste time on the UI to make matters worse ? I’m fed up being their guinea pig for their little experiments. They even removed the ability to get classic theme “à-la Windows 2000” that perhaps looked old school, but was damn effective to show what was actually clickable, where the title bar is, not hiding the scroll bars, etc… Windows XP or 7 user interface was perfect, why degrading the user experience ? Who is under coke at Microsoft and decided to bypass users’ feedback and complaints ? Removing live tiles in an update ? That’s the first thing I do on a new Windows 10 session, dump all these silliness in the bin and shrink the width of the start menu to something more bearable. If I can I install Open Shell and “voilà”.
…but …but I like live tiles.
*sad face*