In my Windows Phone 7 app, I want to use the light theme, no matter what theme the user sets in the phone. How to do that ?
Do I need to custom the style or theme ? I just want the default light theme.
Thanks
Jeff Wilcox offers a good way to do this using a theme manager he developed.
http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2012/01/phonethememanager/
There is a nice way of replacing the default brushes. Saves you setting Forecolor everywhere.
http://www.designersilverlight.com/2011/01/17/theme-forcing-for-windows-phone-7-silverlight/
You'll still need to set the background of the main layout node to the default background brush.
Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"
There is no way to force an app to use a specific theme.
The best you can do is create your own style for every control you use and mimic the light theme in your styles.
Beware, this can be a time consuming and tedious task. Be sure to test all pages and all controls in all states when both the light and dark themes have been specified by the user.
I've had to do this (but for the dark theme) and it's not something I'd do again out of choice.
There are a few tips on doing this from one of the PDC sessions on optimising performance http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2010/10/28/pdc-live-optimizing-performance-for-silverlight-windows-phone-7-applications.aspx
This is a very bad idea.
Windows Phones use OLED displays - the pixels generate light directly, they are not backlit. Power consumption is therefore highest for white pixels. This is why Microsoft is suddenly obsessed with light text on dark backgrounds. It's not a back-to-the-seventies thing.
If you do this you will cause ridiculous power consumption.
For the benefit of the jerk who voted down a factually correct answer, I quote page 63 of the Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction Guide published in July 2010 by Microsoft.
Avoid using too much white in
applications, such as white
backgrounds, as this may have an
impact on battery life for devices
that have organic LED displays.
If you're wondering why Microsoft included a "light background" theme option, so am I.
Related
Here's a recurring problem I've had.
I love using a dark theme for my Windows 7 computer. Unfortunately, the only way to get a really dark theme is by choosing the "High Contrast Black" color style, even though I don't really want high contrast, just darkness.
My theme works great, except that once in a while, there's an app that shows terrible colors because of it. Chrome is one example. I managed to fight that off using the Forced Colors setting, but that setting may be removed in the future, and then I'll be in a big problem.
I'm guessing that each app has some kind of API to ask the operating system about the theme colors. Is there any way to intercept that call and change the data, so specific apps will think that I'm on a non-high contrast theme?
Other ideas and solutions would also be interesting to hear.
I've been struggling with app dialog and toolbar appearances in the social boo theme for some time. I recently discovered that my struggles are less with my code and more with the theme. In the GUI Builder switching the Native Themes from IOS6, IOS7, and Android (Gingerbread I believe) all create very different dialogs ranging from matching to illegible to ok. Also I found this demo:
https://www.codenameone.com/demos-SocialBoo.html
and ran it on my Android (S6) phone. The below image illustrates the problems:
Social Boo visualizations
Note the Dialog's appearances as they change in the first 3 images. Please note in the 3rd Android picture I'm clicking on the Cancel button to show how differently it paints with the pointer pressed. The 4th image is again from my phone, note the toolbar button on the top right with a square image placed oddly over a rectangular button. Ah finally, all the problems I'm seeing in my app happening elsewhere!
Hopefully my title question now makes more sense. Is the social boo theme being updated with CodenameOne releases or is it dead? Should I abandon using it as it'll have quite varied appearances on devices especially iOS? I'd love to have the theme maintain the IOS6 appearance on all devices - how can I achieve that goal? Thank you in advance for your help!
It's a bit out of date. Most developers just cut a PSD design from scratch which works best when based on a native theme.
You can easily fix these things if you want to work with that theme though. When we implement a theme we don't aim to implement every feature that might be needed as those are hard to predict and will increase the theme size. The original theme didn't include design for dialogs so some behaviors leaked out.
You can use theme constants and UIID's like the theme constant dlgButtonCommandUIID to determine the UIID of the buttons within the dialog.
I am debating whether to hide or not to hide the system tray in a Windows Phone 7 application. I've not found any general suggestions on this issue -the official Windows Phone design guidelines don't address this issue at all - except for Jeff Wilcox's blog post who suggested that he personally likes to see the system tray in applications. I'd like some general advice on this issue from other Windows Phone developers.
Some reasons for showing the system tray are
Doesn't take up that much space
Users may want to see it at times
Reasons for hiding it are
You can't control its background: unless you're using PhoneBackgroundBrush as the background the top row will stand out
Lots of widely used / official apps already hide it: all games as well as the official Facebook and Twitter app.
I'd appreciate all advice on this.
Transparency and colors are now possible with Mango by setting its BackgroundColor and Opacity :
shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"
shell:SystemTray.BackgroundColor="Transparent"
shell:SystemTray.Opacity="0"
I would say by default show it unless it really gets in the way in a way you can't workaround, especially if its an app and not a game.
I would say it depends on the application/game you are writing
If the app needs a network connection or if you will be in the application for a long period of time show it so the user can keep an eye on network and battery.
If you need the extra screen space (for a game?), and you rarely need network hide it.
Or... I guess you leave it up-to the user and give them a setting to programatically hide/show it.
I think its best to use the tray in applications that are tools or utilities. Typically these users would prefer more info than less when they're using applications on the phone (battery, network, time).
Also adding the tray in there tends to make the application look more native on the phone (according to me and others I've asked), which is a big plus because the user associates your app as if it was built with the phone OS.
But if the application is a game, media, etc. type of application I recommend you take it off, especially on panorama because it takes away from the intended design. Also these types of applications focus on the content and seeing multiple little icons at the top can take away from the experience.
Really to me the space it occupies isn't really THAT much, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. But rather the purpose of the app as stated above.
I do like the suggestions that have been given as far as giving the user the choice. Check out this code:
bool ShowTray;
//ASK USER WHAT THEY WANT
//ShowTray = true or false;
SystemTray.IsVisible = ShowTray;
I've been reluctantly hiding, at least on any view where I have a background image; otherwise it looks too strange to me. I've been considering a setting in my app that would allow the user to choose, and persisting that to isolated storage.
Also considering maybe having the top of the screen in phone background brush color and have it fade / blend into another color or background image. Not sure how well that would turn out but as long as it is not a cheesy looking gradient effect, perhaps.
I'm hoping eventually MS will soon add support for transparency in the system tray or otherwise help address this issue. As a user I wish that I could force the system tray to always be visible across all apps, but as a developer I realize that the visual effect often doesn't look good.
Perhaps if the community came up with a new UX metaphor where maybe double-tapping in the system tray area would toggle whether it is visible. A single tap could perhaps start to animate / pop / hint at the system tray...
As we know, several modern applications (IE9, Firefox 4, Chrome, Paint.NET, etc.) use DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea for the Aero glass effect.
What type of applications should you really use this for, though? For browsers I can understand minimizing as much extraneous space as possible, but really, what's the point? Why not just create the window without a frame (like Google Chrome does when DWM is not present)? I'm just looking for some rough guidelines on what type of applications should use this effect and when.
Well, as this is purely a visual eye-candy type of thing, you're asking more for subjective opinion than anything else. First, check out the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines, though.
Personally, I like Outlook 2010, where the tab labels are on a glass background - I like the background image on my desktop (or windows behind) seeping through. I think it gives the impression that the window is not taking up quite so much of my workspace. I also love Chrome and it's use of glass for tab space.
I don't like windows media player where the controls are on glass - it makes them seem busy on a busy background. I also don't like the Add Gadget window, where the whole thing is glass (although more blurry) for the same reason.
So pick your design ideals and keep it consistent. My personal pick is to allow glass to come in on windows aspects that are mostly text and uniform, and not the main focus of interaction. On things that are "busy" and are high interaction areas, I dislike having glass behind.
I'm looking for some kind of a resource (website) that would list all possible window/dialog frame styles and their respective combinations with images. I'm only really interested in Vista, as my software won't support older platforms anyway.
I have a more specific case here too: I'm wondering if there are other ways to achieve a smaller-than-normal titlebar for my window than WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW? The tool window style would otherwise suit my needs, but in addition to the normal window border, it seems to add this one-pixel wide white border inside the black outline, and that just looks really ugly for my purposes.
I remember older versions of Adobe Photoshop (CS2?) having these ridiculously tiny titlebars on the tool windows, like 8-10px wide. I'm wondering if those can be done with normal winapi, since IIRC they came in vista flavour too, and conformed to whatever windows skin was in use..?
If it's Vista-only, you can try to use your own window decoration and use the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) API to still provide Aero Glass Theming.
On the other hand, if you're targeting Vista and later, you'll most likely not have to deal with low resolutions. Don't think too much about a few pixels more or less.