Extending Battery Life And Live Tiles-A Windows8 Issue

With the release of Windows 8 expected next year, some time in the 3rd quarter. There is a lot of development taking place, and one of the areas under intense scrutiny is Battery Life, for devices running Tablets and Laptops.

The Metro UI Impact

Microsoft may be torn between the PC and the Tablet. But the market is forcing their hand into the tablet, at least for the consumer end of things. One thing that has influenced the development of the Windows User Interface (UI) is the iPhone interface, with its apps on the screen, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, which is similar. Meaning, that the Metro UI will not be such a big surprise because Microsoft is banking on the fact that users are already familiar with this type of interface…growing from their experience with Mobile phones. So Microsoft is focusing on Live Tiles to make its interface look different.

Live Tiles and Battery Optimization

While the UI on mobile phones looks interesting, behind the scenes is the problem of battery life. Windows 8 developers are concerned with the problem how Live Tiles may impact the tablet or laptop. So here is what they are looking at:

They want to allow hundreds of live tiles to operate without degrading performanceThey want the UI to be artistic and go beyond balloons, badges and text, implement beautiful imagesThe want the interface to be App developer friendly and make it easy so they can just “fire and forget”They also want to put a marker on real-time delivery so delivering “instant messages” is actually instant.

 The Data Driven Approach

Microsoft will use the data driven approach to make this happen; that means that no app code is running in the background to power the Start screen while still delivering live content. This will result in power savings and better performance for the system.

By using a set of predefined properties and templates, a developer can express their live tile, which in this case, is by using an XML schema. When that happens this ports the XML tile data to the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) via a simple HTTP POST. All the code for connecting, retrying, authentication, caching, rendering, and error handling occurs in a uniform and power-efficient way. In the end, this extends the battery life, which was the goal.

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