Saturday Night Live Tiles (I hope this counts, it's the only thing I could come up with)

My #windowsphone 8 lockscreen in 2012 looked something like this photo I found. New nice Bing wallpaper every day, next calendar event over the full with of the screen (or just nothing), icons if there were missed calls, unread sms, unread email.

In 2025 I still cannot achieve this on #iOS . The calendar widget shows "No events" text instead of hiding, no way to add counters for missed calls or unread sms.

The iOS response to everything seems to be "here is a ton of notifications all at once, have fun".

I hate notifications, I do not allow alert notifications for apps, just badges for a few important apps so the Windows Phone approach was just ideal for me.

Sometimes I think about how Retiled mostly exists because I miss Windows Phone so much. I shouldn't be the one to make it since making a desktop is so complex I just know there are things that someone smarter than me would know to put in that would make it more usable or would be a more usable implementation for something I've added in a buggy way (tile positioning I know I'm doing wrong and need to have a way to keep track of occupied spaces, so that's not one of them).

50 years of Microsoft!

What’s the most iconic Microsoft product in your book — Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Phone, Office… or something else?

Metro (and Windows Phone) is never going to return on a corporate scale the same way it was a decade ago if it ever did return because that's just how publicly-traded companies work. They have to change things and nothing can repeat exactly as it ever was before after too many years, even if it means it's for the worse. They have to keep those investors happy with shiny new stuff that may not even be good but works if you're big enough. It just has to be new.

If I ever ran into Steve Ballmer for some reason, I don't think I would get along well because of his bouncing-off-the-wall level energy and the fact that he's rich and was a CEO, but I would still tell him that I'm thankful he allowed Windows Phone to happen despite its failure. I say this because he was the CEO so he had ultimate control over what the company did, and he could've forced it to go in a bad user experience direction or just never let it see the light of day.

Ok, don't get your hopes up because it's really disappointing, but I did some digging and found out Qt 5.8 had a really limited QtQuick Controls style for Windows Phone. All this is is just a thing that seems to redirect to the basic style, so like I said, disappointing. Same thing for the PC folder. The link goes to the folder for the Windows RT (the environment, not to be confused with Windows RT, the OS) styles.

https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtquickcontrols.git/tree/src/controls/Styles/WinRT?h=5.8