I've been thinking about notifications on WP8 and how Live tiles are our notification center, and this is all well and good, but sometimes I'd like more information that a small tile gives me, but I also don't want to always have the tile full size. So here's my thought: What if you could pinch to zoom on tiles? It would be a two step process:
1. Tap and drag down the tile (like you currently do to select a tile on Windows 8). This puts the focus on the tile you're interested in and would prevent inadvertent taps of other tiles.
2. Then you put a second finger anywhere on the screen and pinch out (like you currently do to zoom in on a web page or map)
This would expand the tile to full size (double wide) and it would give you all the info a full size tile would give you (for this mail example, the subject line, sender, and first few lines of the e-mail)
Then you can tap the tile to go into the app, or tap anywhere else, or pinch, to go back to the start screen. The tile returns to the normal size.
This way you only get the information that you care about, when you care about it, while still having just as much information on the start screen. Of course you can always have the three different sizes of tiles for apps that you always want the most up to date info at a glance, but this would add functionality to smaller tiles that might get updated less often and save having to go into apps for notifications you don't actually care about (spam e-mail for instance)
Thoughts?
1. Tap and drag down the tile (like you currently do to select a tile on Windows 8). This puts the focus on the tile you're interested in and would prevent inadvertent taps of other tiles.
2. Then you put a second finger anywhere on the screen and pinch out (like you currently do to zoom in on a web page or map)
This would expand the tile to full size (double wide) and it would give you all the info a full size tile would give you (for this mail example, the subject line, sender, and first few lines of the e-mail)
Then you can tap the tile to go into the app, or tap anywhere else, or pinch, to go back to the start screen. The tile returns to the normal size.
This way you only get the information that you care about, when you care about it, while still having just as much information on the start screen. Of course you can always have the three different sizes of tiles for apps that you always want the most up to date info at a glance, but this would add functionality to smaller tiles that might get updated less often and save having to go into apps for notifications you don't actually care about (spam e-mail for instance)
Thoughts?
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