Developers: Mango Live Tiles No Longer Require Personal Server, Local API Promises More Reliable Push

If you've spent any extended amount of time with Windows Phone in its current iteration, you'd know that live tiles aren't exactly perfect. Live tiles are a comfortable middle ground between widgets and shortcuts, but as of right now they're difficult to implement and even more difficult to keep working. We just experienced the past five days without live tiles before it fixed itself with a power restart, and to say it was hard to live without would be an understatement.

Luckily it appears Mango will be adding quite a bit to improve the platform's signature feature. Thomas Fennel has a discussion with Brandon Watson about the update's new and improved live tile and push notification implementation and it's a great watch. For those who don't have 10 minutes to kill, here are the highlights:

• Live tiles were about to be cut from Windows Phone 7's final build as it approached release, but were eventually saved by developers in the end.
• Live tiles will no longer require self-sustained servers. Instead, Microsoft has setup their own cloud service developers can use to push updates. Windows Phone Mango will support a local push API which developers can use instead.
• The local push API will include the same 500 live tile push updates as we see today. By the way that's 500 per device per day, meaning if you're pushing out to 3 devices you'll have a total of 1500 notifications available to use during that day.
• Pushing data down to live tiles is said to be very reliable in Mango through the new local API, and Thomas Fennel advises developers follow a "simplify, simplify, simplify" mantra when pushing out updates.
• Mango will support up to 30 live tiles on the Start page, doubling the previous amount of 15. However to correct the terminology, it's really 30 live tile "channels"; users can actually add an unlimited number of tiles per app. So for example, pinning the Qantas app and three Qantas flight tracking 'deep link' tiles will all still count as a single live tile 'channel' because they all are receiving push notifications from the same app.

Live tiles are getting a pretty sweet bump in functionality with Mango and in addition to those deep toast notifications we could definitely see a significant increase in productivity for Windows Phone's future. Just a few more months people...think you can hold on?

Update: Our friend Renfred Law (developer of Prime TV) pointed out to us a few errors in our post. For one, Microsoft is not licensing out their servers but rather developers will have access to a local push API. Second is that the 500 live tile push updates is already in effect and is actually per day. Bullet points have been appropriately updated above. Sorry for any confusion!

Source: Channel 9