History

The Tilery was originally called “Applicon.” With release 3.0, I changed the name to “The Tilery” to avoid conflicting with the name of a commercial product that is unrelated to The Tilery and Semicolon Software. With version 4.0, The Tilery became shareware after many years of being freeware: we hope our many faithful users will understand that we can no longer afford to maintain and improve so complex a product for free.

Version 1.0 worked under System 6 by performing various heinous deeds: patching traps, diddling low-memory globals, and invading other applications’ heaps. It required a companion INIT called “Iconic” to do its dirty work. It was intended as an experiment, not as a production application. However, some folks liked it, and it worked well enough to be handed around on an “at your own risk” basis.

System 7 provided many new features to the developer. Under System 7, The Tilery’s functionality (except for “Always Hide Others”) was obtained in a completely clean and supported way, using documented toolbox calls. Version 2.0 was completely re-written to do its work in the approved way. It is a perfectly well-behaved application now: there are no patched traps, no secret peeks into low memory, no fiddling in other applications’ heaps or resource forks. No system extension is required.

Version 2.3 broke this squeaky-clean history in a minor way by adding the “Always Hide Others” feature, which relies on undocumented system behavior. If that behavior ever changes, the feature will likely fail. If that happens, just turn it off. If you don’t use “Always Hide Others”, The Tilery remains squeaky-clean.

Version 4.0 steps a little farther away from the perfectly straight and narrow, most obviously by patching two traps to make its popup tile menus work and look right. The two traps are patched only for The Tilery and not for any other applications, and are patched only while tile menus are displayed: the patches are not in effect at any other times.

Version 4.0.1 fixes two crashing bugs and restores the old behavior of the “Always Hide Others” feature from version 3.x. See “What’s New” in this document for more information.

Version 4.0 adds several major new features, most notably tile menus, hot keys, and working sets. See “What’s New” in this document for more information.

Version 3.2 is fully Mac OS 8 compatible, adds tiles for hard disks and network servers, and fixes a few bugs.

Version 3.1 adds Tile Info in Help Balloons, editable tile text, more Tile Styles, “deference,” and tile repair. A few small bugs have been fixed, and the conflict with the Metrowerks CodeWarrior Debugger has been mostly resolved.

Version 3.0 adds remembered tiles, drag-and-drop functionality, display of custom icons, locked preference file capability, color controls, and a new Help menu. With this release, the product’s name was changed from “Applicon” to “The Tilery.”

Version 2.3 adds the features Always Hide Others, Ignore ⌘Q for Quit, and Finder to Front at Startup, all available under the Preferences menu. It fixes the bug that caused earlier versions to quit unexpectedly when the clipboard contents were too large; it no longer reads from the disk unnecessarily, no longer requires the system’s help menu (aka “Balloon Help menu”) to be present (but you’re on your own for help if you’ve removed the system’s help menu), and improves memory management again.

Version 2.2 fixes a bug involving multiple monitors, and features improved memory management and improved on-line help (thanks to Mark H. Anbinder for the latter).

Version 2.1 adds several features requested by users of version 2.0, including support for color icons, a choice of several styles and sizes of tiles, a way to suppress display of tiles for selected applications, graceful handling of multiple monitors, better use of screen space, and better memory management. The bug that caused version 2.0 to forget your preferences has been fixed.

Version 2.1 (and later) also has its own color icon, but users of version 2.0 won’t be able to see it unless they throw out or archive all their copies of version 2.0, and rebuild the desktop. (Sorry, but that’s how the Finder works!) To rebuild the desktop, hold down the command and option keys when the Finder starts up (right after all your INITs run). Be aware that rebuilding the desktop will delete all the comments in your files’ Get Info boxes, so don’t do it unless you want the color icon more than you want your comments.