Introducing Notifications Visualizer for Windows 10

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Notifications Visualizer is a new universal app in the Store that helps developers design adaptive live tiles for Windows 10. The app provides instant visual previews of your tile while editing, similar to Visual Studio's XAML editor/design view. Your payload is also checked for errors, ensuring you create a valid tile payload.

Developers will find Notifications Visualizer useful when they are looking at adding live tiles to their app. The Visualizer provides an easy way to create and test adaptive tile payloads, without having to edit and deploy your own app. Once you've created a payload with the perfect visual results, you can then integrate that payload into your own app (for generating notification payloads from code, check out NotificationsExtensions).

Notifications Visualizer comes pre-loaded with a number of sample payloads to showcase what's possible with adaptive.

With the Visualizer, you can experiment with all the different text options, groups/subgroups, background images, etc. And you can even see how the tile "adapts" to different devices, like tablets or phones, where more content can be displayed. After you've made changes, you can save your updated payload to a file for future use.

Note: The Visualizer is a replication of Start, and is not 100% accurate (and also does not support some payload properties like baseUri). Pin the tile to Start to verify your tile looks as expected.

The editor also provides real-time errors and warnings. For example, your payload must be less than 5 KB in size (a platform limitation). The Visualizer will warn you if your payload exceeds that. It will also give you warnings about incorrect attribute names or values, helping you debug why your tile isn't appearing correctly.

You can also control base tile properties like display name, color, logos, and ShowName properties. And you can set a badge value too. All of these options help you instantly understand how your tile properties and tile notification payloads interact, and the results they produce.

Download from Windows Store

Learn more about Live Tiles in Windows 10...

The Notifications Visualizer used to be called "Template Visualizer". We showed off the Visualizer at Build 2015 and have finally released it to the public. Sorry for the delay, we were busy adding critical features before it could be released.