Richer 'Interactive' Toast notifications coming to Windows 10 and Mobile

Microsoft has just announced a new developer features that are coming to Windows 10 and Mobile with the Anniversary release later this summer. In short, notifications are going to get a lot more feature-rich later this summer with bigger images, more options, more information, and just a more immersive experience.

The features were revealed in the session titled 'What's New for Tiles and Toast Notifications'.

Interactive toast notifications now reflect the rich information displayed on Live Tiles giving users a more consistent user capability along with more detailed notifications.

No code change is needed for most of the new features, including:

  • Larger 'hero' images in toast
  • App identity and attribution
  • New button style
  • Better discoverability
  • More current and relevant

Users can also now disable notifications for apps via a Settings icon within the notification in the Notification Center. Developers can also add a context menu to notifications to give users advanced functions unique to their app or service.

When an app is opened and residing in the Task Bar users can also now see a badge number count to highlight which app has a new notification waiting in the Notification Center.

Also, it was announced Microsoft Edge browser will support web notifications that tie into the Notification Center.

Microsoft has been 'prototyping' interactive Live Tiles for a long time, but "trying to get it right" before committing. Currently, there is nothing new to announce there yet, but it is something they are interested in doing.

More information soon as this developer session is currently occurring.

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.