If you don't know what I am talking about with regard to potential abuses, look no further than the default Windows 10 Start menu. This means I don't have to waste time opening Outlook to see if I have any new mail I can just look at the counter on the Start screen.Īlthough I still believe that live tiles can be legitimately useful, I also think that some of the use cases we have seen over the past few years call into question whether the benefits of live tiles outweigh the potential abuses. The Outlook tile on my phone's Start screen, for example, displays a counter showing how many new e-mail messages I have received. At the time, I viewed Windows live tiles as a shortcut because they are able to expose application information from outside of the application. When live tiles were first introduced nearly a decade ago, I was very much intrigued by the idea. If I am to be brutally honest, I confess that I have mixed feelings about live tiles. Yet another live tile lists my next upcoming appointment. I still use a Windows Phone to this day, and one of the live tiles on my phone's Start screen rotates pictures from my photo collection, while another displays photos of my contacts. For example, a tile might display the weather forecast or an upcoming appointment.

One such feature was live tiles.įor those who might not be familiar with live tiles, they are essentially just Start menu tiles that are capable of actively conveying information.

As I wrote the book and gained familiarity with the phone's OS, I couldn't help but get the sense that Microsoft was using Windows Phone 7 to try out new features that it was considering integrating into the forthcoming Windows 8 OS. Way back in 2010, I had a publisher approach me about writing a book on the soon-to-be-released Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Related: Live Tiles Menu Dropped in Leaked Windows 10 Build 18947.

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