Best Windows Phone apps for creating and customizing your own Live Tiles

Windows Phone 8 comes now with the ability to customize the heck out of the Live Tiles on your start screen, resize them to predetermined ratios, and shuffle around at will.

This is a huge boost to your productivity with Microsoft's mobile OS, arranging neatly the things that are important to you personally up front and center. Just like with Android's widget system, however, not every developer bothers to create a nice Live Tile as well, and there are limitations imposed by WP itself, too.

A few apps come to the rescue here, that allow you to create and modify your own Live Tile, and we are rounding up some of the best out there to help with your quest to even further customize your Windows Phone home screen. 

Don't expect any wonders, as Microsoft isn't allowing those customized tiles to be alternative shortcuts to most of the default and third party apps, but the remaining functionality still comes very useful to pimp your home screen.

Best apps for creating your own Live Tile in Windows Phone

1. My Live Tile

My Live Tile is a simple free tile creation tool that lets you create a main one, and up to 6 secondary tiles, which can be assigned web links.

In addition, you can use your own pictures, and write up to 75 chars in black or white in both the front and the back of the tile.

2. Wiztiles Pro ($1.49)

With a rich variety of themes and plenty of customization options, Wiztiles Pro should be on top of your Windows Phone personalization list. It lets you pick any color for a background, split an image into tiles, add text on the back and save your work. 

Actions that these homebrew tiles can take let you "make a phone call, take a picture, compose emails, compose text messages, launch websites, configure wifi, configure bluetooth, configure airplane mode, configure cellular, share your status on twitter, facebook, linkedin, windows live, search the web, get directions, use maps, browse marketplace and more."

3. Web Tiles ($2.99)

Web Tiles is a very useful tool to display sections of website of interest to you on the Windows Phone home screen. You can schedule refreshes to watch stock action, weather reports, sports results, and so on. Bear in mind that you can cut and pin on the home screen only the top 2,000 pixels of a website, and sites that require login are not supported.

4. MyTileMaker Pro ($1.49)

MyTileMaker Pro is a comprehensive tile creation app that covers the gamut of options like notes with reminders, lists and images, which can be pinned to the home screen on your Windows Phone. 

You can split a local image in multiple tiles, adjust the text size, tile color, backflip behavior, and send your memo and lists in an email.

5. Tiles

Tiles is a pretty powerful tool whose only downside is that it hasn't yet been updated to support the wide tiles coming with Windows Phone 8. Other than that it offers you many customization options for background, fonts, text and back content.

There are a number of actions your own tile can take when tapped, like visit a website, call someone or send an email, and a set of connectivity options for turning wireless radios on and off are included.