I create my first app for Windows 10. I will use the app for Windows 10 desktop and phone. Great that one code will run on desktop and phone. In my old application for Windows Phone 8 I use Panorama control with three tabs. But I can not decide which component to use - SplitView or Pivot? For desktop better suited SplitView . For phone better suited - Pivot. Need to choose one solution. What do you advise?
First, your following statement is incorrect.
For desktop better suited SplitView. For phone better suited - Pivot.
SplitView and Pivot are for different purposes -
SplitView consists of two parts - Pane and Content. The Content is where the main content goes. The Pane is really just a drawer. This control is meant to provide a very common drawer navigation pattern to the new UWP apps, similar to many iOS and Android apps.
Note that this control is also very flexible, you can use AdaptiveTrigger to customize its DisplayMode to completely hide the Pane when it's on a phone, and make it always visible when on a desktop machine.
Prior to UWP, the original Metro Design heavily relied on the Panorama control (i.e. the Hub control in UWP) for menu navigation and this later becomes a bit boring since almost all the apps that need a menu, use a Pano. So having a new SplitView will definitely help developers be a bit more creative on the main layout design. And besides, the drawer navigation is so widely used across other platforms and users generally know how to interact with it.
Pivot on the other hand, is simply a swipe-enabled tab control. It's meant to display information at the same level and should never be used like a navigation frame. Leave the navigation bit to the SplitView or the old panorama style Hub control, or whatever creative ways you can come up with.
So to answer your question, you don't have to choose one between them, these two controls can co-exist since one does the navigation and the other shows the information, just like what's in the picture below -
Related
Is it possible to implement a Windows Application or extension? to enable iPad like scrolling System wide for all apps ?
The OSX equivalent would be SmartScroll:
www.marcmoini.com/sx_en.html
Possible ?
I found your question in elance.com.
If you need those functions implemented in ALL Windows applications - the answer is NO. Some applications can be forced to scroll smoothly, but not all of them: applications can use custom objects to implement scroll bars. Actually, this task is possible for one (or few) selected apps, but you need to write some code and do testing for each application. For example: Logitech "Flow Scroll" software implements smooth scrolling in popular browsers, i have M325 mouse with this function. In other apps this software don't work.
One thing I think is important is to give users a consistent look and feel for every page and every app on the Windows phone. I figured out how to do pretty page turns the same way native apps do them, and now I'm trying to figure out how to make all my ListBox items look the same way they do in native apps as well.
For example, when you are in the settings app and you click on an item, the item's text shrinks a little bit while your finger is on it, and when you release the button, the text goes back to normal size and initiates a page navigation.
I can do page navigation. But I want my navigation buttons be exactly the same, not just kinda similar. As a matter of fact, I want my whole app to conform so uniformly to the rest of the OS that the users will think Microsoft built it. Is there a standard library, set of controls, or framework that Microsoft uses that we can have access to? Is there a blog or some other resource devoted to showing us how to mimic Microsoft UI design?
Whilst Silverlight for WP7 makes it easy to create applications that have the same static look as the native apps (email etc...), the Silverlight framework lacks much of the dynamic features, the transitions, animations and other effects. A while back I wrote a Metro In Motion blog series that shows how to mimic the fluid animations that are exhibited by the native applications ...
Metro In Motion Part #1 – Fluid List Animation
Metro In Motion Part #2 – ‘Peel’ Animations
Metro In Motion Part #3 – Flying Titles!
Metro In Motion Part #4 – Tilt Effect
Metro In Motion Part #5 – SandwichFlow
Metro In Motion Part #6 – Rolling List Location Indicator
Metro In Motion Part #7 – Panorama Prettiness and Opacity
Metro In Motion Part #8 – AutoCompleteBox Reveal Animation
Hopefully these will help you achieve the native look and feel you are after.
For example, when you are in the settings app and you click on an item, the item's text shrinks a little bit while your finger is on it, and when you release the button, the text goes back to normal size and initiates a page navigation.
It's TiltEffect that you can use from Silverlight Toolkit
Silverlight for WP7 Toolkit TiltEffect in depth
Some system animation effects you can implement with help of Metro In Motion series
Here is a blog post from the Windows Phone team releasing an icon pack with many commonly used icons in WP7. It should be useful in the quest for UI uniformity.
EDIT:
Here is a list + samples of system text styles you can use.
I have a mobile app. On the two major smartphone platforms, I employ tabbed UI - there are 3-4 screens with pretty much independent functionality, they exchange info very occasionally, most of the time screen switching is performed by the user, in arbitrary order.
Windows Phone 7 does not have a tab control, and page navigation assumes a stack model (you go back to where you came from). What would be a sensible WP7 alternative to that kind of UI?
The general Phone-7 replacement for the tab paradigm would be either a Pivot or a Panorama. Which you choose depends a lot on exactly on what you're showing, but generally speaking the Pivot is probably what you're after.
I would recomend a pivot control
WP7 UI is built around the metro style and it was a deliberate choice to not have a tab control. (have a look at the official guidelines here) I would recommend you use a metro control like panorama or pivot.
I am new to windows phone (WP7) and to me it looks like everything on WP7 is about pages. I want a small window to pop up from the bottom of a page while staying on the same page. The small window will have some controls (like slider, list etc.). It should not behave like a modal dialog box though, i.e. the rest of the page (which is not covered by the small window) should still be active and user should be able to do something there. And I want to have a separate C# class which will handle the events from the controls on the small window.
This is very easy on iPhone, using view controllers, is there something similar on windows phone?
It sounds that it would make sense to make your "pop up" part of the page with the content it is intended to manipulate content on that page. If you want to encapsulate the functionality of the "pop up" you could make it a UserControl. If you went this route then animating it to slide onto the screen will be straightforward.
Windows Phone 7 typically uses an MVVM model compared to iPhone's MVC one for app structure. The direct comparison therefore isn't appropriate. WP7 also uses a very different design language to that of the iPhone and so a straight port of application design and layout is also unlikely to create a great experience on WP7.
I'd recommend taking some time to understanding the differences in the platforms and how your existing design would be best suited to recreation on WP7. Not only will this help you create a better experience on WP7 but enable to see if this your question actually relates to something you should be doing or not.
This very much sounds like something that goes against the nature of the platform, and the general design guidelines.
If you're providing some available configuration options to the user, you should do it on a separate page, so the user can change the settings there, approve it, and then be navigated back to the previous page.
However, if you really want to, you're talking about displaying a UserControl inside a Popup. But it wouldn't be a very good user experience, and confuse most users, as it doesn't follow the same look&feel as the rest of the platform.
I have a question about the windows mobile development.
I created a mobile form on the windows mobile 6.0 test project. But that example form slightly larger than the vertically normal pocketpc forms. I now everybody said you can press the scrollbar for accessing bottom or any location of the form.
But i need to use the finger for easy navigating form areas. This kind of iphone :)
Is it possible ? how can i make this ?
Windows Mobile 6.5 adds gesture support, that is supposed to allow such functionality for finger control. Of course, your code has to take advantage of it.
You can also write your own, which isn't difficult, but still cumbersome.
My answer could be classified as subjective. I try to now show the scroll bar when possible for just that reason. On most devices that have touch screen, you can scroll using you finger (and I'm a somewhat large guy -- 6'3" with farmer kid hands).
But if you are displaying a grid, that isn't always possible. The results can go off the screen very easily. Oh well, grab a pen and hit the scrollbar.
Other screen elements that can help: tab control. separate your controls into groups and put each group on a separate tab. I also do a lot of wizards with LARGE next and previous buttons.
But in all of this, if it is designed to be stylus free, just pray the user doesn't have to type anything using the screen soft keyboard. That just doesn't work with a finger.