HeaderTiles, the customisation app for your Start screen, has picked up an update that helps with the design and editing of tiles. With the addition of a template system, the process to create very similar designs across multiple tiles is improved by speeding up the process of replicating a tile design.

While live tiles do help Windows Phone to stand out in a sea of grid like desktop launchers and home screens on other smartphones, it does bring a new paradigm of use to the user, and using just the elements in the OS, you have tiles for shortcuts into apps, links to documents and media, or tiles for the apps themselves.

For many people, that's enough, but HeaderTiles goes beyond that, allowing you more control over the layout, adding in blank spaces, icons, and tiles of text to delineate sections, and colour them as required.

When you come to create a new tile, you can start from scratch, or pick up a design from the templates. The app starts with nine templates, combining layout, fonts, and editable text in a mix of styes, or you can create your own templates as a foundation for your own very personalised start screen. Templates can also be created by cloning an existing tile from the 'My Headers' section into the 'Templates' section.

All in all, this is a good update to an application that is already very flexible and powerful. Making it easier to use, especially if you want to set up a lot of HeaderTiles, is a smart step.

From the updated listing in the App Directory:

"We've included a brand new template system to easily reuse designs, fixed a ton of bugs, and added some more icons."

HeaderTiles is available as a free download, and you can find the links in the AAWP App Directory.