Two Microsoft patents published today reveal interestingly two Live Tile features, one of which was reportedly scrapped in past but later appeared in official documentation and the other is confirmed by Microsoft as coming in future.
First let us talk about Flyout Tiles or MixView that we reported earlier as a part of the 3D-Touch UI that was to debut with cancelled Nokia McLAren. We have already told you that Flyout tiles are in works for Windows Mobile 10 and can be expected in future builds. It was also seen in official documentation of Windows 10.
The above images from the patent show how by just zooming in one can access the flyout or expanded view for any tile that is again made up of the secondary tiles creating what we know as MixView. This is how the Flyout tiles or expanded MixView are explained in the patent.
Techniques for gesture-based access to a mixed view associated with an application representation are described. In one or more implementations, a user interface is exposed by an operating system of a computing device. The user interface includes a concurrent display of a plurality of representations of applications that are selectable by a user to launch respec-tive applications. Gesture-based techniques can be used to interact with an application representation to cause one or more visible targets to appear adjacent the representation. The individual targets are individually associated with some type of application functionality, e.g., a quick action or a deep link into content associated with the application. An indi-vidual target can then be selected, e.g., touch-selected, by a user to initiate the associated functionality.
Interactive Tiles are hotly awaited as arriving and Microsoft has confirmed that it is working on them. Though the patent doesn’t look exactly like the Interactive Tiles demo videos leaked quite some time ago. But Microsoft may have gone for some changes in the meantime. The patent talks about enhanced user-interaction with the Live Tiles
For example, the representation may be configured as a tile that includes a plurality of portions (e.g., sub-tiles) that are user-selectable. The user-selectable targets are con-figured such that selection by a user causes access to corresponding functionality of the application and in this way may provide a “deep link” to various functionality of the application. The tile, for instance, may include a user-selectable target to navigate to a root level (e.g., welcome screen) of the application, e.g., a start screen of a weather application. Other user-selectable targets may be utilized to access other application functionality, such as weather at different geographic locations. In this way, a user may directly access different parts of an application directly from the representation of the application that is usable to launch the application. A variety of other examples are also contemplated, further discussion of which may be found in relation to the following sections. [0020] In the following discussion, an example environment is first described that may employ the direct access application representation techniques described herein. Example procedures are then described which may be per-formed in the example environment as well as other environ-ments. Consequently, performance of the example procedures is not limited to the example environment and the example environment is not limited to performance of the example procedures.
