Don't just browse the web - tilefy it!
Definition: TILEFY
1: To lay out in a grid of interactive tiles:
    "I'm going to tilefy all my bookmarks."
2: The name of the web application hosted at tilefy.com that allows users to create displays of groups of web sites, news feeds, web apps and other resources to the user in a grid of interactive scaleable tiles.
    "I can keep track of my online stuff using tilefy."

See also:tileify.com, tilify.com

HTML5/CSS3 BROWSER REQUIRED

Supported browsers:

  • Firefox - recent versions;
  • Opera - recent versions;
  • IE9 - IE9 in Vista and Windows 7;
  • Safari - recent versions;
  • Chrome - recent versions;
  • Seamonkey - recent versions

You can click on the logo of any supported browser to enter the demo, but first, please take a moment to read these instructions

Mostly-supported browsers

  • Arora - most stuff works.

Unsupported browsers

  • No browser that doesn't support HTML5 supertags, CSS3. Definitely won't work in IE7 or below, probably not in IE8 either. If you're stuck on XP, please download either Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Seamonkey.

About Tile Badges

Tile badges are little pieces of html that you can load into tiles, instead of loading an actual web page. This is both to help speed up the initial tile loading, and to keep you from opening up too many web sites that will slow your browser down at any one time.

Once you've registered, you can decide which web sites you want to be open by default using the bookmarks editor.

Features

1. MAXIMUM GRID SIZE The underlying software supports a grid of tiles of an infinite size, limited by your machine. the current demo displays 400 tiles, each of which can hold bookmarks for dozens of sites ... for most users, this sets a limit of 400 tiles and 10,000 to 25,000 individual bookmarks.

2. CHANGING THE NUMBER OF COLUMNS OR ROWS Click on the large Happy Tile in the upper-left corner to show or hide columns and rows. When there are only 2 columns or rows visible, you won't be able to hide any more.

3. EXPAND TILES Click on the Favicon on a tile to expand the whole tile to a 2x2 size; click it again to restore it back to normal.

4. DRAGGING TILES Arrange the order of tiles by dragging them by the title bar. If you drop a normal-sized tile on an expanded tile, the tile you're dragging expands, and vice versa.

5. OPEN A TILE IN NEW TAB OR WINDOW If you want to load the current bookmark into another tab/window, just double-click the title bar. You can configure your browser to open the tile either in a new tab, or a new window.

6. SETTINGS The gear icon in the upper-right of each tile opens the tile editor. This lets you change the tile's width and height, title text color, default title text, background color, and content background color (handy for sites that have text on a background that's not specified).

When you change the default tile text, it overrides any urls that don't have a label, so you can call your tile "News" instead of having it change with each url.

7. BOOKMARKS EDITOR You can edit the list of bookmarks by clicking on the bookmarks editor icon at the lower left of each tile. If you don't know what the favicon is for a site, you can opt to use a happy tile favicon. The row of icons under each set of edit boxes is pretty self-explanatory - move an entry up, down, add one after, delete that one, and test it out. Select the default bookmark for a tile from the list at the bottom of the editor.

Options The row of icons under each bookmark entry let you change the bookmarks order, add a new blank bookmark, badge or label, or delete the bookmark. Once you've made your changes, click on the last icon in the row to test them in the tile.

about Badges As noted above, badges are light-weight web pages to display instead of a web site, to reduce the load on your web browser at startup. Currently, there are only a limited number of badges: digg.com, newspapers-online_editions, news-world, operating_systems, reference-web_programming, slashdot.org, technewsworld.com, this_page_intentionally_left_blank, tilefy.com, tileify.com, tilify.com, weather.gov, and weatheroffice.gc.ca. Eventually, users will be able to create and share their custom-made badges.

about Labels If you want to visually group bookmarks in the list, just add a label - that creates an option group for the bookmarks underneath it. See the 2nd or 3rd tile in the top row - US Weather - or scroll over to the 4th tile

8. ZOOMING AND UNZOOMING CONTENT That's what the plus and minus are for on the lower right of each tile. Each tile saves two individual settings for scaling - one for when the tile takes up a 1x1 grid (default scale is 50%), and a second one for when the tile is 2x2 (default is 100%). The scaling range is 10% to 300% @ 10% increments.

9. SAVING SETTINGS Registered users do not need to save anything. Their so settings aren't saved in the demo. You'll notice that there are no "save" buttons anywhere - every time you change the width, height, color, list of bookmarks, etc., it gets saved to the server if you're logged in, so no need to worry about it, you can access your tiles from any supported device.

10. FUTURE DIRECTIONS User logins will be enabled some time in January. Then there will be the BADGE CREATOR, the TILE STORE - where people can share their tiles instead of everyone having to copy bookmarks, and the TILE APPS MARKET for people who want to offer web applications customized for tiles.

See also: tileify.com, tilify.com,

-- Barbara Hudson