Usefulness of the tiles?

[borasar]

WHAT meeting lol Sorry, but how many jobs have 'meetings'? I just want a whole month calendar wide tile, calendar, not meetingar.

my job doesn't have meetings, automatically assume all jobs don't have meetings! I guess no one also has doctors appointments, kids related appointments and all sort of other "meetings". You need a month view, open the calendar. Tiles are meant to show you most pertinent information at a glance, not every little detail of it.

 

[Localhorst86]

Showing a whole month on one tile wouldn't really be useful anyway. The screen estate on the tile is just too small.

Sent from my Lumia 920 using Tapatalk

 

[Jason Drum]

The thread title asks about tiles, but the body of your message asks about the UI in general. I'll address both.

Think of a tile as a small window onto which the app can draw whatever it wants when it runs. Some apps have a second program compiled in; Windows Phone can periodically invoke this program to draw new things onto the tile even when the app itself isn't running.

This is a great quick answer to the question. My top examples are calendar, stocks, and weather. I hardly ever open my calendar app, but it shows the next four meetings or appts I have. Same with my weather app...rarely open the app unless there is some alert, but I can see current condition and weekly forecast. I also rarely open my stocks app because it simply has my top holdings and overall holdings listed on the tile. I just zip past it and know what happened today.

 

[Boris Lozac]

Showing a whole month on one tile wouldn't really be useful anyway. The screen estate on the tile is just too small.

Sent from my Lumia 920 using Tapatalk

What?

 

[Localhorst86]

Thank you for proving my point. You won't see upcoming appointments, birthdays or anniversaries. In fact the screenshot you posted does not even show an indicator which days have either of the mentioned above.

Sent from my Lumia 920 using Tapatalk

 

[Boris Lozac]

Just took a random picture of a calendar on the web, don't be silly, and yes, this is what you get when you type 'calendar' in google. I just want to see quickly what day it will be on the 26th for example.. That is more usefull for me then a Meetingar. And maybe when it flips, it shows your fake "meetings"?

 

[borasar]

What?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/79017817/calendar tile.jpg

And what is the purpose of that? it gives you no information, looks ugly as hell and defeats the purpose of a live tile.

 

[borasar]

Just took a random picture of a calendar on the web, don't be silly, and yes, this is what you get when you type 'calendar' in google. I just want to see quickly what day it will be on the 26th for example.. That is more usefull for me then a Meetingar. And maybe when it flips, it shows your fake "meetings"?

yeah that's certainly more useful than knowing what time commitments you have coming up LOL, the calendar tells you today's date and day of the week, unless you are looking weeks ahead, you don't even need to open the app to figure out what day of the week the 26th will be

 

[Boris Lozac]

The purposse is to have a CALENDAR on my homescreen, without opening an app for that, which is actually three or for clicks away on WP8.
When it flips you can have your "Jennie's pillow party at 19:00" meetings..

 

[Localhorst86]

Yes, fake meetings like birthdays. Those of my fake friends and coworkers. Why would you need a calendar to figure out the 30th of a month is a Thursday? A month has a maximum of 31 days, it's way faster to just calculate the the day from the current day than to take out your phone and unlock the screen. Granted, I wouldn't know what weekday 13 of march would be, that's what you need a calendar for. But for this purpose you need to open the app anyways so no point of having it on the tile.

Sent from my Lumia 920 using Tapatalk

 

[borasar]

The purposse is to have a CALENDAR on my homescreen, without opening an app for that, which is actually three or for clicks away on WP8.
When it flips you can have your "Jennie's pillow party at 19:00" meetings..

the point is, you argued that showing appointments is useless, when what you're proposing is significantly more useless.

 

[Boris Lozac]

Not saying that, just that it shouldn't be called a calendar.

 

[borasar]

Not saying that, just that it shouldn't be called a calendar.

equally as silly as saying who needs meetings

 

[James8561]

The couple downsides I've noticed so far on the 520 are:

1. Creating and editing a playlist was a nightmare. Looks like someone forgot a feature. There was a way to do it, but way harder on the windows phone than on the iphone.

2. I liked how the voicemail worked on my iphone on Verizon as opposed to how I'm seeing it work on the 520 over the carrier I'm using. On the iphone it seemed as if the voice messages where downloaded to the phone and thus showed up individually and were easier to manipulate (play, delete). On the 520 I had to dial into a voicemail system and thus the experience was not as nice.

Thanks,
Nick

#1 yea Microsoft is promising fixes with WP8.1
#2 that feature is called Visual Voicemail. It works on my Lumia 920 on AT&T, exactly the same as on the iPhone you described.
Nokia Lumia 520 Support & How-To Tutorials from AT&T
Lumia 520 does have visual voicemail as shown above. Though I highly doubt that your current carrier doesn't use it therefore it will not appear. Also, VV requires data access (wifi won't work) so if you're not on a data plan it won't work.

 

[bsayegh]

I don't know about the live tiles. I like the way you can lay them out. That is certainly a plus. Changing the size and all that is much better than having a standard widget size. Most of the info that I see from the tiles isn't all that useful (granted im on 7.8 so I might not have the same experience as everyone else).

For texts it can be useful, but not as much for emails. Unless you have your phone set up to pull emails as they come, you will probably get multiple emails at once. Is there much use to being able to see a small fraction of the content of 1 out of 5 emails that you have received in the last hour? If you are concerned about your email, you are going to check it.

The tiles are probably a lot more useful on something like a 1520. A large screen can make much better use of it. My phone is pretty big for a phone and I still can read much of the text its is trying to display. If I get a message, I might be able to get an idea of what someone said to me, but im going to have to open it. Maybe of full size tiles had some kind of automatic expand ability. Like if the text is too long (for a message, not so much an email where there could be a ton of info), it can expand. A text can only have a certain number of characters, so they should be able to figure out the limits to which a tile might need to expand. You wont want it that big all the time and you wont want it that big when you get a short text, but if you have al ong one, it would be nice to be able to see the whole thing.

The tiles concept is cool, but underutilized. They could probably expand on it to make it much more useful.

 

[jmshub]

For texts it can be useful, but not as much for emails. Unless you have your phone set up to pull emails as they come, you will probably get multiple emails at once. Is there much use to being able to see a small fraction of the content of 1 out of 5 emails that you have received in the last hour? If you are concerned about your email, you are going to check it.

I use my work email at the biggest tile size, and it works wonderfully for me. It's an Exchange account, so it pushes in nearly real time to my phone. I work in IT, so I get dozens of automated alert email messages a day. At a glance, I can see the name field, subject line and the first line of the email. It lets me know how often I need to click the icon to launch the email client. It shows me when it's a client or my boss that requires examination pretty quickly, or an automated alert from one of our systems.

 

[worldspy99]

Nick - post a screenshot here and folks will be more than happy to offer you tips to make your experience with the WP8 system better. This is from a Nexus 4 convert to Lumia series of phones. The fluidity and the intuitiveness of WP8 is what got me hooked on it. I also have an iPad running iOS7 and an iPod touch running iOS6. So I have experience with all three. It takes a little bit of adjustment but I think you will find ways to maximize the use from WP faster than Android or iOS. It now takes me longer to navigate through the other devices....also this is only my observation that I get fewer app crashes on WP compared to the other platforms but this is dependent on the apps one chooses to run - FYI - I have about 100+ apps installed and I use each one at least once a week.

Take a screenshot | Windows Phone How-to (United States)

 

[manicottiK]

The tiles concept is cool, but underutilized. They could probably expand on it to make it much more useful.

The arrival of highly-popular apps may potentially be a thing that is hurting Live Tiles. I mean that a firm trying to protect its existing branding or app look and feel is going to prioritize cross-platform uniformity over doing platform-specific features like Live Tiles for Windows Phone. There's no way to carry such an idea back to an iOS and Android app. I'm not sure how to address this so that developers exploit the platform more.

Our DrexelOne app has a very small target audience (our students, faculty, and staff). Because our web portal had no real "brand" when the mobile project started, we set about app development with only one major goal in mind: make the apps look native on each platform and exploit the platforms as best we could. As a consequence, the Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, and Windows Phone apps all look different, but they each work just as their users expect because they work just like the built-in apps do. (The BB and webOS versions of our app are now withdrawn.)

Had we been protecting an established "DrexelOne" brand, we'd have approached development differently. I wouldn't necessarily be using pivots or panoramas in my app since such controls don't exist outside of WP. We probably wouldn't have a Live Tile since iOS and Android icons don't change. We certainly wouldn't support secondary tiles because there no concept of an "app bookmark" in the other platforms.

What will be important as we go forward as a community of users will be holding companies to a decent standard. Just as Android users can (and do) object when they're given an app that's obviously a port of an iOS UI, Windows Phones users are going to have to make it known which apps exploit the platform and which are "generic" in nature. This doesn't mean giving apps 1-star ratings for skipping one feature, but it may mean withholding some stars when developers ignore the capabilities that draw us to Windows Phone, and it must mean writing a review to go with the rating and explaining in the review why the app isn't a "good" or "great" one on Windows Phone. (Maybe we can make "fit for iOS only" an acceptable put-down phrase.)

 

[jmshub]

I agree with what you are saying, manicotti, but I think that is lazy programming, and I think it needs called out when it happens. I will down rate an app with no or poor live tile support.

 

[bilzkh]

Live Tiles should evolve into "Smart Tiles."

Basically, there should be a way for us to *interact* with the tiles in meaningful ways. For example, on my wide email or IM or social networking tiles, I should be able to *scroll* down new/unread content. Moreover, the content on those tiles should come off nice and neat, not this stupid cut-off business, i.e. "Hey dude did you see the koala fee[d her baby?]" we have now. Audio controls on audio apps would be nice; pause/play on video app tiles would be nice; a little microphone at the corner of every communications app for voice input would be nice...and so on.