Windows 8 Pin METAs

By  on  

Windows 8 allows for adding websites as apps (or maybe "bookmarks" is a better term) to the home screen, much in the vein that iOS allows users to do the same.  Like iOS devices, Windows 8 allows  users to accomplish this same task using custom META tags embedded within the page HTML:

<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#FF0000" />
<meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="/windows8-icon.png" />

The image size should be 144x144 and you'll want to define a custom background color with the META tag above.  Tags like these are invaluable -- very little HTML to add but a giant convenience to users.  Remember that the easier it is to get to your site, the more likely they will come back often!

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSpy

    I've been excited to release this plugin for a long time. MooTools ScrollSpy is a unique but simple MooTools plugin that listens to page scrolling and fires events based on where the user has scrolled to in the page. Now you can fire specific...

  • By
    dwProgressBar v2:  Stepping and Events

    dwProgressBar was a huge hit when it debuted. For those of you who didn't catch my first post, dwProgressBar is a MooTools 1.2-based progress bar which allows for as much flexibility as possible. Every piece of dwProgressBar can be controlled by CSS...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    I wonder if there are HTTP headers that allows to do the same.

  2. How do you actually go about adding the website as an app in windows 8?

  3. Stephen

    Even though we *can* do this… it really bugs me that we have 8 different ways to set this kind of stuff per browser/device.

    IMHO, it would have been much better if all browsers used the same “link” “favicon” in PNG/GIF/JPG format… and it had attributes for different size icons (device/browser to choose the best size for its needs)

    Instead we have IE searching the at the server root for an icon in *.ico format, special meta tags for iOS, different tags for Windows8, etc. From a *lightweight* mobile perspective… cramming umpteen meta tags in to handle all the potential devices is totally counter productive!

    Oh well… I guess this is progress!

  4. why iOS allows users to do the same.

  5. Magnus

    I agree with Stephen, with every other OS and social media site adding their own meta tags it’s bloating up the element.

  6. Magnus

    That should have read head element.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!