If you’ve been taking part in the Windows 8 consumer preview, you’ve most likely noticed pinned sites on the Metro interface. It’s essentially the bookmark of the Metro interface by allowing users to pin their favorite sites to the Metro start screen for easy access. Developers can utilize these pins to announce updates to their users without them having to open a browser.
The Windows 8 team posted on the IEBlog some of the interesting things developers can do with pinned sites. The most obvious is of course the update notifications. At the moment, the main example they show is pretty simple, but it gets the point across. As you can see, the Microsoft icon shows the number of updates since a user last visited.
Web developers can use these site pins as a way to make themselves stand out as well. The icon they use for their site takes up only a small portion of the entire tile, but it has a massive influence on the tile itself. The dominant color in your Web icon will make up the color of the tile itself. Choose a unique color for your icon and you get a unique attention grabbing tile.
If you want to start creating icons right away to get a pinned site up, just know that you will also want to work with badge notifications. This allows Windows 8 to automatically update the pinned site tile with the newest updates in the background. Microsoft has the example code on the blog post that details how developers can start enacting this now.
The IE10 team also points out that a popular feature from IE9 is back in IE10 in a whole new way. They are of course talking about jump lists which allows users to get to a specific part of a site. In IE10, the jump list is now a part of the navigation bar.
Check out the blog post for the code to fully implement these features into your Web site for Windows 8 and IE10. The newest version of Windows may only be in the consumer preview for now, but it’s only a few more months before it goes it starts popping up everywhere. It’s better to get your Web sites ready before it launches.