If you have been a user of The Tilery 3.0 or Applicon 2.3 or earlier, you may want to read this chapter for an overview of the new features added to The Tilery version 3.1.
Tile Info
Help Balloons for the tiles now display useful information about each tile and its item, including the item’s name (useful when you’re using a tile style with no label), its type (application, document, folder, etc.), its full pathname, and for open applications, the amount of memory it is using and the amount it has free.
Help Balloons can be turned on and off by selecting Show/Hide Balloons from the system’s Help menu (that’s the one with the icon at the right end of the menu bar, and not The Tilery’s “Help” menu). When The Tilery is frontmost, pressing the Help key on your keyboard will also toggle Help Balloons on and off. Some keyboards do not have a Help key.
Custom Tile Labels
You can change the labels on remembered tiles, if you don’t like the default labels that The Tilery supplies. To edit a label, ⌘-click a tile to select it, then press Return. You can now edit the tile’s label. When you are done, press Return again or click anywhere outside the tile.
To restore a tile’s default label: Edit the label, completely delete all text, and press Return.
New Tile Styles
The Tile Styles feature has been enhanced to offer more control over the size, shape, and content of the tiles. You can now select a color for the tiles’ labels.
Deference
Suppose you are in application A, and you click a tile to launch or bring forward application B. Then you quit application B. Normally, you’ll find that The Tilery is now the frontmost application. Some users would prefer to have application A be frontmost, as if The Tilery were not involved; others would prefer to have the Finder brought forward instead of The Tilery.
The new “Deference” feature handles this. From the Preferences menu, select “Defer to Next App” to have application A brought forward after application B quits; or select “Defer to Finder” to have the Finder brought forward; or select “Don’t Defer” (the default) to leave The Tilery in front.
Tile Repair
The tiles are pretty good at keeping track of their original items, but it is possible to break that connection. Renaming the item, moving it elsewhere (especially to another disk), upgrading to a newer version of the item, or simply deleting it are ways in which a tile might lose track of its item.
In 3.1, a tile that can’t find its item will bring up a dialog asking you to either cancel (the tile remains unchanged), forget the tile (the tile is deleted), find the original item (a standard file dialog appears, allowing you to find and specify the old item, or if you wish, a similar new item instead), or find and open the original item (same as “Find” but also opens the item).
Bug Fixes
Earlier versions of The Tilery sometimes could not find applications to open documents, if the applications were on a file server. This has been fixed.
The Tilery 3.0 had a conflict with the Metrowerks CodeWarrior debugger. The debugger would fail to hit some breakpoints in the source code being debugged if The Tilery was open. The Tilery 3.1 no longer causes this conflict, provided that the item being debugged does not have a custom icon. (Most applications don’t, since they have BNDLs instead.) Metrowerks has also provided a fix: their DebuggerINIT version 1.1.1 (that’s the INIT, not the debugger itself) does not have the problem. See <http://www.metrowerks.com/> for more information.
Hiding a tile for a folder, document, or control panel could cause tiles for similar objects to be incorrectly hidden as well. The symptom was that some tiles would unexpectedly disappear, as if they had been deleted. They could be returned to sight by selecting “Show All Tiles” or the appropriate “Show Tile for..” menu item from the Tile menu. This has been fixed.
It was possible to accidentally place one tile on top of another, effectively hiding the other tile. The Tilery will now ask permission before doing this, if “Grid Drags” is selected.
Microsoft Mail could not cut, copy, and paste correctly if launched from a Tilery tile. This has been fixed.
The Tilery can now look up and display icons a little faster in some cases. This may result in speedier startup for some users.
