Tile
The Tile section controls the single repeating animation every tile in the grid plays — before any time shift staggers them apart. Everything else in the app is built on top of this.
Sequence
What it does: picks how one tile fills in, frame by frame, from empty to completely full. Every sequence is a one-way trip — pixels only ever turn on, never off, so the tile always reads as "filling in" rather than flickering.
There are around 25 presets, but they fall into a few families. The examples below show a single tile in isolation, with the grid and Time shift both out of the picture — this is the shape every tile in the grid is playing before anything staggers them apart.
| Fill (a straight wipe) | Middle-out / Outside-in (grows or shrinks from center) | Scattered (Dissolve, Halftone, Plasma) | Special (Spiral, Pinwheel, Clock wipe) |
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The baseline sequence used throughout this guide (Square Middle-out) is a member of the second family — a square growing outward from the tile's own center, which is exactly the family you'd reach for if you want something that reads as one clean, deliberate shape.
- Fill family: a straight wipe across the tile — left-to-right, top-to-bottom, or any of the four diagonals. The most literal, "reading direction" feeling of the bunch.
- Middle-out / Outside-in family: grows from (or shrinks to) the center, in the shape of a square, circle, diamond, cross, or X. This is where "Square," "Circle," "Diamond," "Cross," and "X" all live.
- Scattered family: Dissolve (random pixel order), Halftone (an even, dithered darkening), and the two Plasma variants (a soft, organic gradient). These read as texture appearing rather than a shape growing.
- Special family: Spiral, Pinwheel, and Clock wipe — all rotational, sweeping around the tile's center rather than growing outward from it.
📖 Jargon watch: every sequence is secretly the same idea — a number assigned to each pixel (its distance field) that gets revealed a bit at a time. You never need to think about it this way day-to-day, but it's why, for example, "Square" and "Circle" behave so similarly (distance from the center) while "Fill" behaves differently (distance from an edge).
Checkerboard
What it does: a toggle available on most sequences (not the already-scattered ones, where it wouldn't be visible anyway). Instead of one solid front, the tile fills in two interleaved passes — like a checkerboard, one color's squares filling first, then the other's.
| Off | On |
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Turning it on doubles how long the full loop takes to play (there are now two passes instead of one), but the app automatically keeps the pace feeling the same — it stretches the loop's duration to match, rather than making everything feel twice as slow.
Tile size
What it does: the pixel resolution of the tile itself — how many individual pixels make up the pattern described above. Bigger means smoother, more gradual growth; smaller means chunkier, more graphic steps.
| Small (4px) | Baseline (10px) | Large (24px, the maximum) |
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(Shown at each size's true resolution — the larger image isn't just "more detail" at the same physical size, it really is more pixels.)
Two things worth knowing:
Very small sizes can flatten a sequence entirely. At the smallest possible size (2px), Square Middle-out has no exact center pixel — every pixel is equally close — so instead of growing, the whole tile just switches on all at once:
This isn't a bug, just a real limit of a 2×2 grid of pixels having no "middle." Some sequences (Fill, for instance) don't have this problem at any size, since they never rely on a center point.
Larger tile sizes need a correspondingly large on-screen size to actually look smoother. If a tile is drawn small on screen, extra internal detail above a certain point stops being visible — you're better off matching tile size roughly to how big the tile will actually appear, rather than always maxing it out.