Live Tile Feedback

Thanks for the quick response. The main thing I'm thinking about is streamlining the case where I might be working with a number of folders and files. Since the live tile currently only displays information about unsaved files, it seemed like it would be nice to make use of that space in another fashion. An annoying thing that I go through when editing files is opening up the file explorer to grab a file or a number of files from locations when those files are already open in Code Writer. I figure that if the live tile showed both the unsaved and the saved count, plus a listing of files that the application currently has opened, this might make it easier to get to the file I wanted and make sure that it is open in Code Writer quickly. If the file is already listed, then I can just click on the tile and get to the file. If it is not, I have the option of clicking on the tile anyways and going straight to opening a new tab, or I can go to my desktop and get access to any open file explorer windows that I have, which may be faster than using the built-in file navigation for Code Writer depending on the situation. And finally, if I know whether or not I have unsaved files and which ones those are I can quickly save them before going to sleep or shutting down.

If you have a better, more productive use of the live tile, I think I would prefer that, but this is the most useful thing I could think of right now, and since the live tile doesn't get too much use, I thought it might be worthwhile to suggest it.

It looks like the best live tile template to use would be the 4 text line version, so you could show something like:

Document1.cs
Document2.cs
Document3.cs
Document4.cs

But then what about other documents that are open?  They wouldn't be listed.  One thing that could be done is do the above if there are 4 or less documents open.  If there are more, do something like:

Document1.cs
Document2.cs
Document3.cs
+ 5 more

We could list the document in order of their last accessed time, similar to how the MDI tabs are arranged.

What are your thoughts?

This seems like a good approach. Is it also possible to cycle through the list of documents? Perhaps have a rolling view like Mail does? I am quite new to how the Live Tiles work so I wouldn't know if that is possible.

The other thing is to have something like 1/5 showing for the number of opened files and unsaved files instead of just showing the number of saved files. However, if the tile says something like "+ 5 more" then it would not be a big problem to have only the unsaved count there. Is it possible to list the unsaved files in italics or put a mark like * next to them to indicate that they are unsaved in the list?

Thanks for the reply.  It would be hard to add multiple screens since that's more for news stories that don't necessarily need to show in order. 

The templates Microsoft gives us doesn't let us do italics or bold, etc. but we now have a single screen live tile working pretty well here in development.  I think you'll like it when it comes out in v2.0.  It functions in both small and wide tile sizes. 

Thanks for the information. It's good to know what some of the limitation of the live tile are. Not that those are necessarily bad. I look forward to seeing how things go with the next version. Thanks for the quick response!

I have been playing with the latest version and I thought I would mention that the new live tile (at least, it's looking new to me) is working great, and I really like it.

Great, we're glad you like it.  We do too!