Published by Steve Litchfield at 13:36 UTC, March 12th 2018

You'll remember that I featured a new little utility, PAWA, last week? This lets you pin any modern HTML5/PWA site/URL to your Start screen in such a way that what gets launched is not the full Edge browser but instead an instance without the URL bar, i.e. you're using the site/app full-screen. The catch at the time was that it was effectively limited to just one site/app, but this has now been addressed and you can now have as many shortcut tiles as you like.

As before, you give the tile a title, paste (or type) in the exact URL you want to go to (in this case the Google Maps Go PWA) and pick an image to use for the tile. Then tap 'Create Tile' and you're done. Note the absence of any way in the UI to edit that tile again - you'd have to unpin it from the Start screen and then make it again.

As before you can now go back into PAWA and make other tiles, with other URLs and other graphics/icons. However, whereas the initial version usually brought you to the running PAWA/Edge instance, even if it wasn't the tile you tapped on, PAWA is now clever enough to launch the right URL from the right tile.

I.e. in the initial version, you only got the right site/app from a tile if you'd bothered to manually close that from the Windows 10 multitasking carousel, but now you can tap away and if there's a running instance of PAWA/Edge then whatever app/site it's handling will be junked and it'll load up the right URL for the tile you tapped on.

So here I've made three PAWA Start tiles (along the bottom of my Start screen), and the right PWA/HTML5 site gets launched for each tile. In the example above, I tapped on the right hand tile and am now in the wonderful National Trust HTML5 site. And no URL bar in sight!

You can grab PAWA in the Store here. I wonder what else could be done to improve it? Maybe an optional warning to save any work in an existing PAWA instance before a new one is loaded? Ideas?

This is certainly a great addition to Windows 10 Mobile anyway, especially as there are now so many HTML5 sites and PWAs taking the place in many cases of native WP8.1 or UWP applications.