Tiles
Staying with Stardock products for the time
being, we thought Tiles deserves a place in this list. Tiles is an interesting
product in that the name suggests something along the lines of a Windows 8
interface, but it’s far more simple than that and probably a lot more
effective.
At first glance, Tiles looks like a blank
Windows Sidebar type affair, which in effect it is, but there’s a lot more to
it than initially meets the eye. The sidebar Tiles section is organized into
pages, which can be swiped to the right and back again to reveal a number of
customized sections, or pages, containing your most used programs.
Tiles
allows you to have a modern tablet look without the hassles of a modern UI
Tiles, despite being the main focus on the
screen, still retains the Start bar along the bottom of the screen when
installed, and it’s worth noting that the traditional Start button is left
alone as well. The main point of Tiles is to make it focus on what you’re
trying to get done, to lessen the time. It takes to switching between
applications and bring similar programs, pages and links together to create a
rich and efficient way of working, like using your desktop as a tablet, but
with all the benefits of still having a keyboard and mouse. In addition, very
much like a tablet in behavior, when you’re moving from one page to another,
you can opt to have each program automatically minimized or restored as you
move around the various shortcuts you’ve created.
As with Fences, Stardock has developed
Tiles to be fully customizable, in terms of the naming of the Tiles pages, the
placement of the side bar (location and size are customizable), colors, opacity
and so on. You can theme Tiles with a selection of skins or to match the
current OS desktop look, and you can even select a replacement background
texture for the Tiles side bar.
Perhaps
Microsoft should have taken this route with Windows 8?
You can add pretty much anything you like
onto the Tiles bar. By holding don Shift, then clicking and dragging you can
move open Windows, web pages, documents, icons and shortcuts into each Page,
then swipe across and work on another Page. Once a page starts to fill up, you
can then sue the mouse wheel to scroll down through the programs in the Tiles
bar without messing up anything going on in the main desktop.
Tiles, in its most basic form is free; you
won’t have support for multiple monitors and you won’t have access to the large
number of skins available, but for the basic purpose of using Tiles and
starting to get your desktop organized in a more modern way, this is an ideal
place to start. Alternatively, you can opt to pay $9.99 for the Tiles bundle,
which consists of the aforementioned multiple monitor support and the much
coveted skins pack.
You
can add pretty much anything you like onto the Tiles bar. By holding don Shift,
then clicking and dragging you can move open Windows, web pages, documents,
icons and shortcuts into each Page, then swipe across and work on another Page
Tiles is really good and it makes you
wonder just how well Windows 8 may have been received if Microsoft took an
approach like Tiles instead of going immediately into the full-blown new UI.
Microsoft could have had an operating system that incorporated the best of both
worlds: a tiles-based tablet look and feel and one that would still work
perfectly well with the touch-screen Microsoft Surface, with the added benefit
of not alienating the keyboard and mouse users by doing away with the
traditional desktop. Surely the simple act of setting a few options at the
start of the Windows installation (e.g. Is this a touch-screen or not?) would
have made all the difference. Anyway, ours is not to reason why, but if you’re
in the market for a modern take on desktop organization and efficiency, then
check out Tiles at goo.gl/gZOrW.
