Windows 10 tiles

Does anyone have any advice about creating a Windows 10 ‘tile’ style shortcut for an installed app, using Innosetup?

It creates the usual Start menu etc, and people seem to be OK with that, but I was wondering if I could get my app to appear in a colored square tile too.

Ha Jeff, what are the odds, I was just reading about that.

If all goes well I’ll have some code to create a tile in a little while as its a prerequisite for Toast Notifications.

Cool. Im looking about too, but havent found anything Inno related yet… be interesting to see if / what you come up with.

Seems that Windows 8 methods stopped working in 10
And new Windows 10 methods dont work unless you have the latest Windows 10, and run as administrator…
They really dont seem to want people adding a tile, do they? :slight_smile:

I can’t remember any application I’ve manually installed that had created a Tile during installation. And to be honest - I wouldn’t like it, if an application would do that.
I’ve added tiles for a couple of apps in the Startmenu, by manually choosing which ones - and where to place and organize them. Maybe that’s the reason I wouldn’t like an app to add it itself :wink:
So I’m OK with that, too.

The “colored” part is interesting though… Desktop Applications usually don’t have a distinct color and show in the current Windows theme color. You can define how your tile looks like if you create an .appx package of your application. Have a look at my example project: Xojo2AppX.
However, installing that .appx also just creates a StartMenu entry, and not both StartMenu-Entry and a Tile. The same for Apps installed from Microsoft Store.
I can’t say if that’s intended or not - or if there might be a way by creating some registry items during installation (even though users don’t expect that and maybe don’t like that).

Back to the “color” of the Tiles: Maybe these links provide interesting information about how to customize the appearance:
Customize Start Screen Tiles Background Color, Text Color and Logo
VisualElementsManifest.xml for start screen tiles
Windows Dev Center: How to customize Start screen tiles for desktop apps (Windows Runtime apps)