We need more live tiles

[Fiann]

There are so many excellent apps coming out with Live Tile support. It's a real shame that we're limited to only about 10 that can use live tiles or other background agents. I really wish MS would have raised that limit in Tango. As much as I love my phone it's another area where I feel MS dropped the ball.

I realize they did it for memory usage and battery life concerns but they could have implemented it as a scheduled update system that doesn't require a background agent running all the time; something like scheduled tasks in Windows. Basically the OS keeps a list of applications that need to update their live tiles. At the scheduled time it launches an update process that updates the live tile info and then shuts back down so that it's not using any resources. It could be used for live tiles that might not need updating as often, low-priority live tiles or something, and be done on a schedule set by the user, like email, every 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, daily, etc. There could even be an API where the OS has a process that goes out and grabs the data and sticks it onto the live tiles in a specified format and the app doesn't have to run at all. The app would just tell it go get this data from this location and put it onto my live tile like so. This approach could also make live tiles usable on 256 MB devices. Normal background agents as they exist now could still be available for apps that needed them.

tl;dr There are too many live tile programs out there. I want to be able to use more live tiles!

 

[eric12341]

The limit was raised to 30 with mango.

 

[awesumjon]

The things you've mentioned of how the app should update can all be done by the developers. Not the way it's done, but the things it does. In apps the user can set when the LiveTile updates and with the implementation of the real tile some apps let the user select how/what information is showed.

So I don't think it's a problem of how its done, but rather a limitation of the hardware (with 256 ram devices that is). I think the background tasks were always there, but Mango let the user choose which apps they didn't want running in the background.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, not all apps that use a LiveTile are in the background tasks menu. Ffffound for example.


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[J4rrod]

There's a limit of 30 since Mango.

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[sting7k]

There's a limit of 30 since Mango.

Sent from my Titan II using Board Express

What's with the warning then when I get up to 9 background tasks?

 

[PG2G]

Not all live tiles use background agents. Some are updated via push notification (the preferred way), some poll a URL for an image, and some use background agents.

The limit on background agents is different than the limit on live tiles

 

[jimski]

And background agents don't run constantly. As the OP suggests, they wake up at a prescribed interval, fetch updated data, and then go back to sleep. Urban Dictionary for example, only does this once a day. I agree that 9 is a bit slim as I run 8 normally, so not much headroom, which results in my preferred background tasks being disabled occasionally. 12 or 15 would be a better number, without compromising performance or excess battery drain.

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[Fiann]

The limit was raised to 30 with mango.

I always get warnings at 9 that I've hit my max. Maybe if more didn't use background agents to accomplish it but they almost all seem to.

And background agents don't run constantly. As the OP suggests, they wake up at a prescribed interval, fetch updated data, and then go back to sleep. Urban Dictionary for example, only does this once a day. I agree that 9 is a bit slim as I run 8 normally, so not much headroom, which results in my preferred background tasks being disabled occasionally. 12 or 15 would be a better number, without compromising performance or excess battery drain.

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

Right, this. I'd gladly sacrifice the minimal amount of battery life it would require. I'm sure I would end up using more by trying to launch the app and check the information.

 

[jimski]

I always get warnings at 9 that I've hit my max. Maybe if more didn't use background agents to accomplish it but they almost all seem to.

.

Exactly. Prior to Mango, using a push server was the only solution, but a server is expensive to maintain. So now everyone is resorting to background tasks to pull info at prescribed periods. I am still doing some testing, but so far background tasks appear to draw very little juice. Most likely less than 1% per hour with 8 tasks, although only 5 of them pull info from the Cloud.The others only check on device.

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[scdkad]

More?! I wish half the ones I have now would just work