Live Tiles

zed

Legend
After using metro for 3 or 4 years finally I have a case to use MS's limited version of widgets 'live tile'.
But I cant for the life of me work out how its meant to work.
How to display the current countdown time on the live tile? It must be simple but its not working captain
countdown.png
 
the first only works with days, the second is crazy yes it has a live tile, but you can't stop/pause/change it when you've set it

I've tried about 60 apps on the windows store, none are good enuf,
also surely this can't be true?
you can't search on the store for apps that work on the PC, seems like 2/3 of the apps there don't work on the PC, i.e. they're mobile only.
I'm on a PC, WTF show me all these mobile apps that can't be installed on my machine, I know the windows store has been a disaster but surely they must realize dumb decisions like this ain't helping. The person that OKed this is Literally braindead :???:

guess Im stuck with
https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=c...irefox-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&ei=I4q4WLjmGszN8ge6y6UQ
Not ideal, though I do have the browser open 99% of the time so its not too much of an issue
 
For some reason I remember the clock program in Windows 3.1, when minimized to an icon, would tell the time! Am I right?

Umm.. like, you can download Visual Studio 2017 free edition, find some templates to make an "app" with a Live tile and build an half-assed timer app for yourself, by yourself? I hope I were kidding but by the sounds of it, you will waste a lot less time than crawling the store.

This could be a marketing opportunity for Microsoft : "Our software store sucks, so make your own software! Try our latest Visual Basic .NET" (I don't even know if Visual Basic is fit for the purpose. I would hope so else why do they bother supporting and updating it)
I think the pitfall with app stores stems from something like that. A 12-year-old kid, a student, a cubicle programmer of median skill who's trying to learn a few APIs or a .NET language make a timer app or some trivial but useful application like that. They got it running, and they can also hit "publish" to further their sense of accomplishment ; it might reward their ego and/or be fun or they may feel proud of contributing something.

This ought to be fantastic, but imagine if in the days of the old Doom there was a "WAD store" built-in, connected to id software's servers, and it got full of crappy WAD levels. 15,000 of them, done by everyone and his grandma.

Microsoft has that silly reputation, with unwanted Windows phones (in part due to a huge first mover advantage for Android), unwanted Windows 8 and most PC users afaik are on Windows 7 and can't even use the new software. People don't take them seriously. Perhaps their Windows Live UWP Metro is technically the best platform (it's hard to even know how it's called), perhaps it's much better than iOS and Android but they had a try before with Silverlight.
Silverlight was a browser thing that was likely much better than Java applets and Flash. It could have been huge (fast browser games, video streaming...), but was much too late and Apple, Google shunned it anyway. Google controlled the phones and youtube, Apple controlled the phones and App Store. So, Google would have had to make a Silverlight version of Youtube, and Apple would have had to allow Silverlight on iPhones (they didn't : no bytecode, no interpreters allowed. They wouldn't even tolerate a C64 emulator because BASIC from 1982 on simulated hardware from 1982 would be a competing software platform)

I have to stop writing, else I will leave too many sentences here, as much as there are too many app in the stores.
This goes into the territory of philosophical questions : how can we bring focus back in such environments or despite the environment.
 
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Umm.. like, you can download Visual Studio 2017 free edition, find some templates to make an "app" with a Live tile and build an half-assed timer app for yourself, by yourself? I hope I were kidding but by the sounds of it, you will waste a lot less time than crawling the store.
I could, though it would most likely take me longer than looking for an already existing app, more to the point WTH doesnt MS's own clock app support live tiles
For some reason I remember the clock program in Windows 3.1, when minimized to an icon, would tell the time! Am I right?
perhaps it does, but I dont want another app running in the background, thus alt-tab requires me tabbing through an extra app

At the moment I just google 'countdown timer' and run that in a browser tab
 
Got an idea that you might have indirectly given me. I think I will use a mechanical timer as a count down. I do have a small oven that can do it when not connected to power. Might set the timer and do house chores while it is ticking (e.g.)
 
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