Pinned Sites in Windows 8 describes how site developers can provide a site icon (favicon) for their sites’ pinned site tiles on the Windows 8 Start screen. Many of you shared feedback that you’d like to provide higher-resolution visuals to better depict your site brand on your users’ pinned site tiles. In Windows 8 Release Preview, you can to do that: we’ve added the ability for you to provide a PNG tile image and specify the tile’s background color.
[h=3]Example[/h]Below are examples of a pinned site tile using the site’s favicon and automatically determined color (left) and high-resolution PNG with custom tile color (right):
[h=3]Markup[/h]Meta tags specify the tile’s image and background color. Example:
Tile images must be square PNGs 144px by 144px. For best results, we recommend using a transparent background, not a background that matches the tile’s color. The tile color can be specified as a hex RGB color using CSS’s #rrggbb notation, via CSS color names, or by the CSS rgb() function.
See this behavior in action on our updated Fresh Tweets demo.
Note: IE10 only downloads the tile image when the user pins the site to his or her Start screen so sites don’t incur additional bandwidth costs.
[h=3]Conclusion[/h]Internet Explorer 10 allows Web developers to create high-quality site-centric visuals for pinned site tiles, allowing sites’ brands to be better reflected on the Windows 8 Start screen and look more visually integrated with the rest of the app and content tiles. Developers need provide only one high-quality icon that Windows 8 will scale as needed for devices running at different resolutions.
Sites can also share notifications and offer jump lists for quickly navigating around the site. See Pinned Sites in Windows 8 for how.
We look forward to you adding these simple features to your Web site to maximize their impact in Windows 8.
—Rahul Lalmalani, Program Manager, Internet Explorer
More...