Live tiles, honestly

A live tile is a promise that the thing behind it is alive. On Windows Phone, the start screen was never still: a photo slid up over a contact’s tile, a count changed on the mail tile, the weather turned over to show the temperature. None of it ran on an obvious timer.

Continuum’s tiles do the same, gently. A project with a cover image turns over now and then to show it. A project with only a description shows that instead. Tiles turn only while they’re on screen, never while you’re hovering one, and never when motion is off.

Sizes#

Tiles sit on a grid four columns wide and use Windows Phone 8’s sizes:

• small: one square
• medium: two by two
• wide: four by two
• large: four by four

Set one in a project’s frontmatter, or leave it out and the start screen picks a rhythm of wide, medium, and small tiles for you.

tile: wide
icon: map
accent: teal

icon picks the glyph on the tile’s face, and accent gives the tile its own color, from the twenty accents or any hex value.

Opening one#

Tap a tile and the tiles around it turn away, leaving it alone for a moment. Then it grows into the project’s page while its label flies up to become the title. That’s the Zune open, and it runs backward when you go back.