Create Custom Windows 8 App Tiles With OblyTile

Windows 8 lets you pin any program and files to the start screen, but it doesn’t allow you to customize the appearance of the tiles or the icon of the pinned program. These classic-styled program icons stick out like sore thumbs among the metro tiles on the start screen.

OblyTile is a free program that lets you create custom tiles and swap them with app tiles you want to customize on the Windows 8 start screen.

Creating a new start screen tile with OblyTile is extremely easy. Run the program, enter a name for your new tile (optionally, you can hide the tile name), choose the program you want to associate the tile with, select a large image and small image (30 x 30) and finally click the Create Tile button.

The large image will appear as a tile in the start screen while the smaller image appears when you zoom out of the start screen using the “-“ button on the bottom right corner of the start screen. The larger image should be at least 120 pixels by 120 pixels in size and both images must be in the PNG format.

In OblyTile you will notice an option to set the background color. This comes into play only when the image is a transparent PNG file.

In the screengrab below, you can see the default Opera tile on the left and my customized Metroish tile for the Opera browser on the right. Which looks better?