Skip to main content

Live Tiles

Live tile 
is one of the most attractive features of Windows phone.
It displays continuously useful information on tiles in real time with charming animations. There are several ways to make tiles "Live" on Square home as well. I'm sure you could make your home awesome by applying the following ways.


1. Displaying notifications on tile

When you get a notification from an app, you should expand the notification panel from the status bar to see the content. Now you do not have to pull down the status bar anymore because Square home displays the notification on the app tile that is added into your page.

Notifications on tile
To activate this feature,
 - go to "Live tile" in Home options.
 - select "Notifications".
 - enable Square home in the notification access.

The app icon and notification text are switched continuously on the tile with some cool animation. If the notification contains a picture in its content, it will be displayed as a full image on the tile as well. If you dislike showing the notification text and picture, just turn on "Notification text off" and "Notification picture off" respectively in Live tile options.

* Troubleshooting: If the notifications stop showing on the tile even when you enabled Square Home in the notification access permission, it's because the background service gets killed for some reason. Please check your battery saver option for the app in the system settings in this case. Since some manufacturers' devices may have more system options like "Auto start" to keep the background service alive, try to search the solution for your device on the Internet.


2. Media controller

This is another cool feature of Square home, which is activated on a media app tile when it is playing music or video. A lot of media apps such as YouTube, Play Music, Poweramp are supporting this feature.

Media controller on Play Music tile
Just turn on "Media controller" in Live tile options to activate this feature.


3. Built-in widgets

Square home supports following built-in widgets to show useful information. Those widgets consume low battery and works very efficiently.

Built-in widgets
From the top in the above picture,
Analog clock, Clock, Calendar, Event calendar,
System monitor, Battery circle, RAM circle, Storage circle, SD card circle,
Photo slide, Compass, Flashlight.
And more built-in widgets will be added in future updates.


4. 3rd party widgets

Since there are tons of 3rd party widgets in the store, just choose one of them for your purpose. For example, if you want to get weather information in real time, just select a weather widget you like from the store and add it into the page.

To add a 3rd party widget to the page,
 - press the "+" tile.
 - select "Widget".
 - select "Android widget".

Some widgets might have margins around and it looks a little ugly.

Ugly margins around a widget

You can cutout the margins by setting negative values to "Margins" of the tile options.

Removed the margins

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding Tile Background Effects

Square Home currently supports a total of five tile background effects. Go to Home options > Tile sizes and styles > Background effect and select one of the following effects. 1. Disabled This is the default value when you first install the launcher. You can disable the wallpaper or use System wallpaper or App wallpaper to use this effect. If you disable the wallpaper, it uses a black background color, which you can change in Home options > Behavior and UI > Background color. It looks a bit boring at first, but you can use different tile colors and rounded corners to create a nice screen like this. Background effect disabled When using a wallpaper, you can also customize the tile style color to be translucent so that you can see the wallpaper behind the tiles, as shown in the following picture. Applying translucent tile styles on a wallpaper If you want to apply adaptive tile colors here, please refer to the following post. Adaptive Tile Colors to the Wallpaper 2. Blurred S

Now Supports Foldable Devices!

There's a great news! A new update (v2.2) has been released and it starts supporting foldable devices finally. As you know, the previous versions already support different layouts for different screen orientation. When you set "Screen orientation" to "Same as system", you can layout the tiles differently for the portrait and the landscape mode. Layout transition on screen rotation For a foldable device like Samsung Fold 2, you should have enabled "Tablet mode" that supports horizontal scrolling to use the launcher properly. Yes, it's not good enough though. The new update supports the different screen size, for folded and unfolded, in the same way while "Tablet mode" is off. You can build the layouts differently like the following screenshots. Folded Unfolded Enjoy your foldable device!