[Windows Phone 7 General] akshay2000:
So, we all love our metro UI! Okay, few of us don't but many do. All those big live tiles, adding aesthetics to functionality. Maybe, after a few days, months or years for that matter, one might find it boring to have same tile-tile monochrome layout and a bunch of theme colors. While there is not much that can be done about it, here is a cool trick which adds some refreshment to the look of WP7 home screen! Now, let's admit it, we all have grown up with the concept of wallpapers. They're everywhere - on Windows PC, Mac, Linux, Android, even on iOS! (Though I wonder, how pleasing a wallpaper looks when icons are being filled up linearly, leaving less than 25% of the wallpaper visible and your app icon falls right on the eye of the cute face in the wallpaper!) For WP7 home screen - no wallpaper. This trick allows us to convert the tiles into pieces of wallpaper so that the screen looks like beautiful picture made by solving a kind of jigsaw puzzle.

By no means, I have used any of my creativity in this. I found this trick buried in a Japanese blog here. I thought it would be cool to share it! All credit goes to the author of the article.

The catch is to make image resembling an array of live tiles like this one:

And then use it as a webpage and pin the web link to start using IE.

Actual steps are like this:

1. Create (pick some wallpaper or crop your favorite one) an image with resolution of your screen, i.e., 358x728.

2. Then add black frame of thickness 12px as shown in the picture. Tiles are 173x173.

3. Upload this image to a web service which allows you to view image file as image right inside your browser. Dropbox public folder works fine.

4. Here comes the tricky part. Open up the image in IE on your WP7 device. IE will think of it as a webpage. Adjust the magnification and position of your webpage (Which is your picture) such that the first tile such that, it fills your screen edge to edge horizontally, and the top edge of the image is aligned to the address bar. So, now you have left edge of the tile aligned to left of screen, right to right and top to top. Ignore the bottom edge. Example:

5. Go to menu and select pin to start. Your tile will be pinned to start as a webpage shortcut live tile!

6. Repeat procedure for all the tiles.

7. Now, go to start rearrange the tiles so that overall appearance is of a complete picture.

So, that was easy, wasn't that? Just a bit tricky with alignment, right? I have a simpler solution! Why not create eight different images, one for each tile having resolution square pixels equal to the width of IE page? Just create a square image with width equal to that of IE and then zoom it to 100% by a simple double tap. This was image will be already aligned. Only catch is that the image will be scaled to fit into the tile, but the difference was not noticeable when I gave it a try.

Agreed to the fact that this thing would take up all the screen space reducing productivity of the live tiles, the trick is worth try. We can have the tiles below the wallpaper. It also acts as a little puzzle. Mix up the tiles and then rearrange them to complete the picture! Its worth a shot if you are already tired of old look and want to try something new. Share your wallpapers in the post.

P.S.: Don't forget to have a look at original post here. If you don't understand Japanese, Google translate is your friend. I don't understand it either! :p