Windows 8 Live Tile - Remove text and small icon?

Question

We are using TileWideImage and TileSquareImage and appropriate XML (as described here) to setup our custom tiles in our Windows 8 game as you finish different levels in the game.

The way our tiles are designed, we don't want any text or icons to show up at all (other than the single image we have created for each version of the tile).

For some reason, TileWideImage puts our app's small icon (I think 30x30 pixels) in the bottom left. We also notice our default icon has text on it when you install the app. Neither of these are desired.

Is there a way to get the behavior we want?

Looks to be a variant of the following (set 'none' as the value in the branding node of the XML): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12328964/show-app-name-on-tile-update/ — Nathan Kuchta, Sep 12 '12 at 22:55
Whether text is shown on the default tile can be configured in the app manifest (Application UI -> Show Name). — Nathan Kuchta, Sep 12 '12 at 23:13

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 13 '12 at 00:47

You can turn off the text on the default tile via the application manifest:

enter image description here

but if you send a tile update that setting can be overridden by in the XML Schema via the branding attribute of the visual or binding tag.

In this case you'll want to send your tile updates similar to:

<tile>
    <visual branding="none">
        <binding template="TileWideText03">
            <text id="1">Hello World! My very own tile notification</text>
        </binding>
        <binding template="TileSquareText04">
            <text id="1">Hello World! My very own tile notification</text>
        </binding>
    </visual>
</tile>

By the way, the App Tiles and Badges Sample is a great resource to do quick tests on tiles like this, confirm behavior, etc.

Windows 8 Live Tile - Remove text and small icon?

1 Answers1