Live tiles for pinned websites in Windows 8.1

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Among the many benefits Windows 8.1 brings, one of the features that I haven’t seen mentioned much is the ability for websites to have live tiles, continuing to blur the lines between local apps and web apps. In fact, pinned tiles can now also send notifications just like local apps.

As an example take a look at the great Atari Arcade website that allows you to play classic Atari games in your browser without plugins – it all runs in HTML 5.

If you fire up Atari Arcade then choose to pin the website, you get a choice of tile sizes:

Atari pin 1Atari pin 2Atari pin 3 

You can move between them by clicking or tapping on the arrow signs.

If you choose the wide or large tile sizes, you’ll see that the pinned tile flips to show information about the games:

 Atari 1Atari 2b Atari 3b Atari 4 Atari 5  

Pretty cool. If you’re a developer and want to know how to make this available for your website visit the excellent http://www.buildmypinnedsite.com/ to see how to do it. The good news is that it’s really simple to implement.

 

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