Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Windows Phone 7 “Tile Maker” (Think “Let a user select/make their own ‘tile’ for your app” control)

Mike Hole - Tile Maker

“One of my applications on the marketplace is the countdown tile application. This is a simple application that when pinned to the home screen lets you see a countdown of the number of days until a certain date.

One feature that people ask for is the ability to use their own pictures in the background of the tile. This is something that I have been aiming to do for a ‘Pro’ version of the application to try and convert some of the 6K users into 75p purchasers :)

I am in the early stages of putting together a Tile Maker control that presents the user with an area the size of a standard live tile. Behind this area can be placed an image that the user wants to use within the tile. This image can be moved around by using multi-touch gestures. Once the user has the image in the desired place they can then take a snapshot of the tile area to use as the live tile.

If this control interests you you can download the current Alpha code from codeplex at this link:

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CodePlexwptilemaker

“This is a Silverlight for Windows Phone control project to help people specify a 'tile' image from a source bitmap. The control lets the user move the image around an area on screen once the image is places to the users preference then the resulting bitmap can be used as a tile.

2011-05-09 14h02_53_2

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I thought this would be neat feature to have in a WP7 app. I just like the idea of letting the user design/select/make their own image for a tile. It really seems to fit the whole intended Windows Phone 7 experience…

(via Windows Phone Geek - New Open Source WP7 Tile Maker control: wptilemaker)

1 comment:

rrafa said...

Great post. I agree with you that should have an app to let the user create it. Windows 8 launch ignited this desire on me.

If anyone is interested in developing such an app, let's talk . I can provide business.