Microsoft Patent Hints Windows Phone’s Exploding Live Tiles Might Still Exist

The discontinued Nokia McLaren brought forward a few very interesting ideas although it was believed that Microsoft gave up on all of them when it decided to discontinue the project, it appears that at least one still lives on and could see daylight at some point in the future.

The “exploding tiles,” as we know them, or “Mix View,” as Microsoft calls it, is a new type of live tiles that allow users to access certain features of the supported apps without having to actually launch the apps.

Basically, when you tap on a live tile on your Windows Phone device, it “explodes” into multiple parts and each would have its very own sub-feature. For a multimedia app, for instance, you could have options to control playback or adjust the volume, all without having to open the app.

And it appears that Microsoft has actually patented this idea, as revealed by Twitter user @h0x0d and could use it at some point in the future (there’s no guarantee that this is going to happen, though, so although exploding tiles might actually still exist at Microsoft, the company could decide to never use them).

Gesture-based functionality

The patent that Microsoft filed explains that exploding live tiles would be accessed with a gesture, such a pinch, which would enable the “explosion” and divide a larger tile into multiple smaller ones.

Redmond explains in patent documents:

“Gesture-based techniques can be used to interact with an application representation to cause one or more visible targets to appear adjacent the representation. The individual targets are individually associated with some type of application functionality (a quick action or a deep link into content associated with the application). An individual target can then be selected (touch-selected) by a user to initiate the associated functionality. The application representation can include any suitable object including an icon, a tile, or so on.”

At the first glance, exploding tiles seem to be the kind of feature that consumers would love to get in Windows 10 Mobile, so certainly, this new patent will lead to another very popular feature request for the Redstone update coming this summer.

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