I will start new PDA project on the windows mobile and compact framework 2.0 or higher.
I need to design the new application user interface like IPhone, it should be smilar IPhone buttons, gradiend screens, colors, some thing like this. It seems i need to many images and backgrounds on the windows mobile application for achieving this.
I don't need to use default pocketpc UI elements, it's not useful for my project and me.
I need your some suggestions about the new pocketpc app user interface design.
Could you please share me your ideas or suggestions ?
Have a look at:
http://fluid.codeplex.com/
and
http://www.beemobile4.net/
This CodeProject article will be of interest for you (iPhone UI in Windows Mobile). You may also want to look into UI Framework for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 (MSDN article describing some of the features).
I feel your pain. Worse yet, I use Win32 and C/C++ for my WM apps, which none of the listed UI libraries even support.
The end result is that unless you buy UI components from someone else for this platform, then you will unfortunately have to write your own UI controls. I had to do just that myself. :/
There is more info here.
I took a look at all these options, Fluid looks nice but the complexity of the code put me off. I've gone with a very basic approach (which fits my current needs) and I've written an ImageButton control
I'll add a vote for Resco. I been working with .NET for years but don't have any mobile or C++ experience. The Resco controls are not cheap but they made it vastly easier and cut my dev time by at least 50% and probably a lot more. In the scale of things the cost is nothing compared to developer wages and missed deadlines. No affiliation - just a happy customer :)
Also check out the Resco Toolkit
Related
I wonder why none of the Xamarin Prebuilt Apps at https://www.xamarin.com/prebuilt support both iPad and iPhone? They all have the same design on each resolution. Especially Apps like 'Acquaint' would be perfect on iPad to have the contact list on the left and the details on the right. But instead it just has the same design like the iPhone Version.....
Are there any reasons why Xamarin does not offer samples with different designs depending on the client resolution? Are there somewhere else some examples?
Many thanks!
You might want to take a look at our Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms Book First Edition by Charles Petzold.
I work on the same team as Charles and I know it's a topic he's covered in detail. The full book should be available soon too.
BTW, we are looking into creating some detailed, annotated cross-platform app samples that do all the goodies that a typical modern app would be expected to have.
I do not know of any of the stock Xamarin examples that use OnIdiom, but it just a matter of time to code them...hahahah, always just a matter of time and code. (I'm sure the Xamarin guys can chime in on this one):
Xamarin.Forms.OnIdiom Class
<OnIdiom.Phone>Vertical</OnIdiom.Phone>
<OnIdiom.Tablet>Horizontal</OnIdiom.Tablet>
In terms of finding examples that use the Xamarin.Forms XAML OnIdiom I would search Github for OnIdiom, there a few OSS examples of phone/tablet switching floating around there as I used at least one as a template to do a quick phone/tablet prototype for a client.
I have made one windows phone based application. i want some designing ideas from you wp7 people.how can we apply styles,transparent background or the design which suits wp7 app. may i have some links which provides snaps for good designed apps. please help
One app that jumps to my mind when talking about great use and adaption to the metro design, it's "Cocktail Flow". It has very well done implementations of many design cues for WP7. As special treats it has features like parallax effects controled via gyroscope.
You can find a free version on the marketplace. Definitely worth a look.
MSDN user experience guidelines are pretty good, User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone.
Also, it helps to install some popular apps from the marketplace and study their design.
The BEST thing you can possibly do to get a good idea of how to build a great WP7 app is to own a Windows Phone, and use it as your primary phone.
Get used to the way the operating system flows. Download cool apps. As time goes on you begin to understand from the user's perspective what a "good" app looks (and more importantly) feels like. It's a hard thing to nail down in a "user experience" spec. I find that a lot of people who set off to build a WP7 app do so before understanding how apps are supposed to behave on the platform. It is vital that you understand how users expect applications on the windows phone to operate. If you use a windows phone for a good 3-4 months, and really make an effort of butting it through the steps, it will be hard to walk away from that experience without a very clear idea of what a "good" application looks like for the windows phone.
That being said, and while I honestly don't believe that there are any short cuts to good design for the windows phone, I highly recommend downloading the following apps, and playing around with them to get a feel for "good" UI:
Wordament
Cocktail Flow (previously mentioned)
Twitter
Spotify
Yelp
Any of the built in applications (Office, Zune, Internet Explorer)
The above are good to start with, but again, you're really not going to understand it unless you live and breath it everyday for at least a few months.
I have to develop an application for Windows Mobile 6.x and version 7 and my skillset is .net and web based. Since version 7 is not backwards compatible I am thinking that I will end up with a lot of duplicate work.
I had a look at Rhomobile and Phonegap but the later does not support windows mobile 6.x and the former would require ruby knowledge.
I thought that I could have as much logic in class libraries as possible and then "include as link" the classes into projects so that they can be compiled for the specific platform. I feel like I may end up with a lot of #if PHONE7 style logic in that case and also the user interface code would have to be implemented for each platform.
What is the most efficient way to solve this problem?
If you can separate the UI from the logic you can begin to multi-target. The other consideration is the runtime of the phone (Silverlight 4?) and the phone sandboxing giving you limitations.
MVVM Light is multi-targeted and is open source, you could use this to review how they tackled it:
http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/d546dc69fffd
In short though, your "add as link" idea is pretty much the basis of it.
The other question to ask is will the application fit on both platforms? The usage style from mobile to metro is a big change. People expect things to behave a certain way and look a certain way on metro. If you can confine this to the UI and move as much logic out as possible, then you should be ok. But there will come a point where it isn't worth sharing, it is simply easier to duplicate.
Sorry for a lack of detail in this answer, to be honest it is heavily app specific. I would personally start with separate applications and refactor as commonalities appear, using a combination of linked code files and hash defines.
A cute trick... you can always make the classes partial and have a partial code file for each hash define:
MyBusinessClass.CF.cs
MyBusinessClass.Silverlight.cs
We are developing an Windows Phone 7 mobile application. We are new to this platform. In our application, screen will be dynamically generated. So we would like to render the UI
programmatically - without using any xmls. Please share some example code or resource or links, wherein UI is rendered programatically. In case of iPhone development, we referred "UICatalog" example. We are looking for similar type of example
It is possible to render the UI in code, though the examples of doing so are few and far between because it's a rare thing to do with XAML-based technologies like Silverlight and WPF. Instead, you tend to find that developers use to databinding and data templates to present generated content.
If you are porting an application from iPhone to Windows Phone (or even if you're just starting from scratch), the best thing to do is to firstly make sure that you understand the development platform. There are some great resources for this on MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wp7trainingcourse_wp7gettingstarted_unit.aspx
The next thing to do is to make sure that you understand the Metro design language that Windows Phone is built upon. Here are some great resources in that respect:
Metro Design Language for Windows Phone 7
Microsoft design .toolbox
From Transportation to Pixels
Once you've reached this point, you will most likely realise that your current approach isn't the right one and switch to a databinding and data templates approach :)
If you are doing an iPhone port, it's important to realise that the design approach is different for Windows Phone applications. Content is King, so work out what that is, put it "front and centre", and trim away every thing else.
I hope this helps.
You may want to investigate the XNA path for Windows Phone development.
Developing with SilverLight but choosing not to use the most useful features of the platform is probably not going to be fun.
What features can I look forward to in Windows 7 that will:
Make my job easier as a developer.
or...
Make my job "different"(harder) as a developer.
I've been hearing a lot about performance improvements and a few UI effect enhancements, but nothing really about what development on Windows 7 will be like. Thanks.
Following are areas that are new:
multi touch API for developing touch based applications
new concept of 'libraries' for storing user specific data (similar to mydocuments)
Enhanced support for GPS and other such hardware
Office2007 Ribbon like user interface
Refer to http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/default.aspx for details.
The new sensors API will make your job easier, provided Microsoft can get enough people on-board with it. It should provide you a standard way to interface with things like GPS and light sensors, if you program with that kind of thing.
Very east to use and seamless Virtual PC is great for debugging and testing.
Touch is another new capability.
Feature list from Wikipedia.
To answer your actual question:
I don't think any of them are aimed at developers explicitly (such a tiny niche really).
For the begged "Features to use in apps" question:
I'd like to see lots of search extenders, jump lists, and those little "preview shortcut" button things (I have no idea what they're called).
Microsoft publishes an official Windows 7 Developer Guide.