Yesterday I blogged about the release of the Days Until Xmas application (don't forget you can grab it from the Zune Marketplace here - http://bit.ly/acLe1V).
A lot of the feedback I have been getting from friends and reviewers (can we please get the ability to respond to reviewers comments on the Zune Marketplace?) is that the application needs live tiles, which shows the days running down to Christmas. This is something I kept thinking and thinking about and it ended up coming down to the two ways you can update the live tiles on Windows Phone 7. These are...
Push Notifications
Push notifications is probably the most common way data is going to *pushed* to your phone/application. Push notifications require a separate server to send the push notifications and also to know the unique URI of the device that will receive the notification. In the case of the Days Until Xmas application, this would create lots of work to manage users who have signed up for the application, what time-zone the user is in, every time the application loads up we would need to check that the user is in the same time zone and so on. The server would then every half an hour need to check if any of the users time zones went over the day mark and send a push notification out so the tile could be update. Since this is just a fun out of hours project, this could consume a lot of time to implement. This still wouldn't account for users who have push notifications turned off/have no data access and would leave an incorrect day on the home screen.
Local Notifications
The ShellTileSchedule allows the developer to schedule updates to the phone without the need for any external server managing push notifications. This still requires the need to have a data connection since any live tile received from the application comes from an external URL. The schedule can be set to fire off at intervals throughout the day, however; the issue with this is in the context of the Days Until Xmas application is that the URL, where the application goes to gather the live tiles is hard coded, for a shell tile schedule is the same for each scheduled interval. This means that we cannot go and get a different day/tile for the current application without changing the image URL when the application loads up so the application would update the tile every time the app loads up but kind of defeats the point of a live tile.
Your thoughts...
So after hearing this, what are your thoughts? Maybe I'm missing something obvious but sadly time is a rather complex thing and varies from location to location but I'm open for any ideas.
I hope this helps, maybe it's worth having the tile update when you load up the application anyway?
Cheers,
ChrisNTR