14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 8, the next-gen operating system from Microsoft, arrives with a Metro-style version of Internet Explorer 10, capable of delivering a brand new experience to all users.
As part of this experience, websites can be pinned to the Start screen for much faster access that before.
Starting with the newly launched Windows 8 Release Preview, Microsoft also offers developers the possibility to provide a site icon (favicon) to be displayed on the tile on the Windows 8 Start screen.
Through enabling this, the company is making sure that users benefit from higher-resolution visuals when pinning favorite sites, and that developers can also make their site’s tiles stand up in the crowd.
“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,” Rahul Lalmalani, program manager, Internet Explorer, notes in a blog post.
These images need to be square PNGs 144px by 144px. Microsoft also recommends the use of transparent backgrounds and notes that there are a few ways to specify the tile color, including hex RGB color using CSS’s #rrggbb notation, via CSS color names, or by the CSS rgb() function.
When a user pins the site to the Windows 8 Start screen, only the tile image is downloaded, so that no additional bandwidth costs are involved.
“Internet Explorer 10 enables 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,” Lalmalani notes.
“Developers need provide only one high-quality icon that Windows 8 will scale as needed for devices running at different resolutions.”
Moreover, he explains that sites can share notifications and can also offer jump lists so as to make navigation around the site faster than before.
You can download Windows 8 Release Preview build 8400 from Softpedia via this link.