Microsoft's Channel 9 has posted a nice video demonstration of all the push notifications and Live Tile change coming in Windows Phone Mango. In addition, they interview Thomas Fennel, who's in charge of that aspect of the OS (we saw him speak at MIX11 in a similar demonstration). To recap the changes from our earlier coverage:
- Local notifications: these aren't push, but instead are purely local--great for alarms, reminders, "note tiles", etc.
- Deep Toast: Say 'Weather Bug' gives you a flood toast notification, when you click it, it can now take you directly to the flood alert, instead of just opening the app. This is very cool.
- Multi-tiles: One app, 'X' amount of tiles. For example, you have a news app with World, Local and Political news, you can now create individual Live Tiles for each category, or whatever the dev allows
- Live Tile limit bumped: Currently, you can only have 15 Live Tiles on your phone. Starting with Mango, that goes to 30.
- Tile flip: When a notification comes in, the Tile can "flip" with a back image (see video)
- Improvements: Reliability, performance and efficiency (15 min polling, down from 60) have all been adjusted and made better
We've already seen how BBC News Mobile and the Weather Channel are looking to take advantage of the new system and our very own WPCentral app is currently being "Mango-ized", as a few of you lucky beta testers are now experiencing. In fact, we may have a video demo tomorrow of our new "flippy tile" and push notifications.
The interview with Fennel is quite interesting as he explains their motivation, reasoning behind the decisions and things they are looking at for the next version of the OS, expected to be "Tango". And on the Channel 9 page, they link to a bunch of resources on the new system, which is worth checking out if you're a developer.
As a side note, we can say after running "Mango" for the last seven weeks, we haven't had a single "end point failure" with our Live Tiles or push notifications, which means despite have nearly 15 Live Tiles they are all working perfectly. So for those who currently are experiencing Tiles not updating, hold tight as Mango fixes this and fixes it good.
