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November 2, 2015
Mobile

Introducing Notifications Visualizer for Windows 10



Notifications Visualizer is a new Universal Windows app in the Store that helps developers design adaptive Live Tiles for Windows 10.

The app provides instant visual previews of your tile while editing, similar to Visual Studio’s XAML editor/design view. The app also checks for errors, ensuring you create a valid tile payload. Below is a screenshot of the Notification Visualizer app:

1_visualiserApp

One of the great things about this tool is that it provides an easy way to create and test adaptive tile payloads without having to edit and deploy the app itself. Once you’ve created a payload with the perfect visual results, you can then integrate it into your app. See Quickstart: Sending a local tile notification to learn more.

Notifications Visualizer comes pre-loaded with a number of sample payloads to showcase what’s possible with adaptive Live Tiles and help you get started. Then you can experiment with all the different text options, groups/subgroups, background images, etc. And you can even see how the tile “adapts” to different devices, like tablets or phones, where more or less content can be displayed. After you’ve made changes, you can save your updated payload to a file for future use.

Note: The Visualizer is a simulation of the Start Menu. It is not always 100% accurate and also does not support some payload properties like baseUri. So when you have the tile design you want to use, test it by pinning the tile to Start to verify that it looks as intended.

The editor also provides real-time errors and warnings. For example, your payload must be less than 5 KB in size (a platform limitation), and the Visualizer will warn you if your payload exceeds that. It will also give you warnings about incorrect attribute names or values, helping you debug any visual issues.

2_visualiserApp

You can also control tile properties like display name, color, logos, and ShowName. And you can set a badge value too. All of these options help you instantly understand how your tile properties and tile notification payloads interact, and the results they produce.

Of course you can still generate notification payloads from code, and this process is explained in this NotificationsExtensions blog post.

Click the Store icon below to get the app:
3_downloadFromStore

Learn more about Live Tiles in Windows 10…

Check out the following posts on the “Tiles and Toasts” section of MSDN Blogs to find more about creating the best & most engaging tiles and notifications in Windows 10:

This post was written by Andrew Bares, a program manager on the Developer Platform team.