Pin To Start™

Pin To Start changes coming with "Mango" release

Wow! We just got done sifting through the Windows Phone 7 video sessions from MIX 2011, and all we can say is, Wow!.

Last month we ran a contest to see who could create the best Start screen design which “captured the essence of MIX”. We narrowed it down to 5 finalists and then let our Facebook fans vote for their favorite. We were pleased to be able to provide a free ticket to the MIX 2011 conference to @sirtwist (the pass was provided by MIX co-creator, Jennifer Ritzinger).

MIX 2011 took place last week from April 11 – 14th and while we were unable to attend this year, lucky for us (and you), all MIX sessions are available to watch online. We spent the weekend watching all the Windows Phone 7 sessions and keynotes and are pretty excited to get started on our next major release of the Pin To Start Series of applications which will leverage the new features being introduced in the “Mango” release of Windows Phone 7.

So what are these new features and how do we plan on leveraging them? While it is still early, and the development tools are not out yet, based on what we have seen from the demos the first thing we will be able to do is remove the requirement of Opting-In in order to create your custom Live Tiles. How will we do this? Easy, Microsoft will be providing a new API that will give us the ability to create and update your Live Tiles without the need to leverage Push Notifications. This should mean that creating your Live Tiles will be much more reliable since we do not need to use an extra service component to update your tiles (we can update them directly). This also means that we will not need to use one of your limited number of push notification “channels”(currently 15, will be 30 with the “Mango” release) to update your phone, letting you leverage this channel for other applications you have installed. We think that this will solve some of the major issues we have seen our users experience with the current version of our app.

Another new feature we plan on leveraging is the ability for one application to create multiple Live Tiles. This should mean that we can remove the other 7 Pin To Start applications from the marketplace. These applications are exact duplicates of the Pin To Start application, but allow you to create more than one custom Live Tile. With this change, you will still be able to leverage our TileConnectR images and create custom tasks for each tile, but you will no longer need to have the same app installed up to 8 times on your phone. Awesome!

The Mango release will also provide even more customization options for your Live Tiles by allowing your Live Tiles to have both a front and back side. The tile will flip at random intervals so you can see the front and back sides directly on your Start screen. We plan to leverage this additional feature and allow you to add even more customization options to your custom Live Tiles!

We are also excited about the new “background agents” being introduced in the Mango update as well. This should allow us to add additional functionality to allow you to further customize your Pin To Start application. We have many ideas that will now be possible by leveraging this feature, but don’t want to give away too much right now.

We are also currently working on a few features we think you will really enjoy and which many of you have asked for. The main feature we are working on is the ability for you to take pictures and use them for your custom Live Tiles. We are even working on giving you a way to create your own TileConnectR images from these pictures!

So you can see that we are heads down tying to improve the app and making sure we are on top of the latest and greatest features being introduced in the next major release of Windows Phone 7. There is no word yet on when the “Mango” release will be available to consumers. We should get the developer tools in May and hope to see the release of Mango and the next major release of Pin To Start sometime this Fall.