If I try to hit the 'clear' button on my filter TextBox, the command bar thinks I'm trying to hit the ellipsis and opens, without letting my click through to the cross.
Is there anyway I can get around this?
ApplicationBar is a system control where we can't do much. We can change colors, opacity and that's all. There is no way to modify this behavior.
You have to consider changes in your design. For me as a user and graphics designer it's really strange that your search box is on the bottom. It's natural to put it on the top. It's on the top everywhere in Windows Phone, so I suggest you to be consistent with the OS.
Related
This is only an issue if you have Drop Shadows turned off in appearance settings.
I noticed some of our applications form windows had no borders. Specifically they have been missing the 1 pixel thick border for the left part, right part and bottom part of the form window. All of the forms had in common that they were using FormBorderStyle FixedToolWindow or SizableToolWindow. When it is like this it is hard to distinguish where one dialog stop and another one begins.
We find it plausible that some of our users will have their computers set up like this without the ability to change it.
Is there a way to get the dialog windows looking better without doing anything crazy like manually drawing all borders?
Quoting part of a comment by Hans Passant:
By design for Win10, the left/bottom/right borders are transparent. Still quite visible against the large drop-shadow, so visible that is hard to tell that the border is transparent...
Our application has its own grahpical style that made it especially hard to distinguish where one dialog stops and the other one begins.
The quick solution for us was to stop using FormBorderStyle FixedToolWindow or SizableToolWindow.
Long term we are going trough all our dialogs and the graphical style of our application to make the dialogs more easily distinguishable from each other with or without borders.
Multiple instances of the same application are running at the same time, and since each has multiple windows, it is not easy for the user to navigate between them. I help users by setting the titlebar color of different application instances to a different value. For example, all windows of the app instance started first will have red titlebar, all windows of the second instance will have a green one, etc.
It would also be useful to set the taskbar button color of app instances to the color I use for the titlebar. Is this possible? If not then I would be happy with a solution having similar differentiating effect, like setting the color of the text on the taskbar button, adding an overlay icon to it, etc.
The solution should work on Windows XP and later Windows versions. The language can be C/C++, C# or Delphi. Thank you very much in advance!
You cannot hope to achieve differently coloured taskbar buttons.
You could install your own shell and take complete control of the taskbar, but you can't expect your clients to do that.
You cannot expect to paint over the top of the Windows taskbar. The taskbar is animated. How are you going to keep up with that? How are you going to even know where the buttons are? I don't believe that there is a public API that will tell you that. I think you have to rule that idea out.
There is an API that allows you to change the colour of a taskbar button. It's the taskbar progress API added in Windows 7. You could use that to make your taskbar buttons yellow, green or red. I personally would not recommend that since the user will think you are showing progress.
The main options that are available to you are to change the window caption, and so the text that appears in the taskbar button. Or to change the icon.
I have some tiles layed out as buttons in my app. Im not that good at xaml and hope someone here can guide or show how i come around making them behave alittle like the tiles in the start screen of windows.
I have with some template set. How can i add the little border when mouse is moved over it and how do i make it look like it gets pushed down when clicked.
my button is just a sqare box with a background color.
You have to edit the Control template for Button. And add an additional border which should appear on Pointer over state. Write your own animation in Visual State manager to achieve this. To make this more easier just open your project in Expression Blend. Right click the button and choose edit template. the default template will fell into resources, so that you can just modify.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc294908.aspx
To perform a push effect, need to animate Scale Transform in pointer pressed state.
Regards,
I'm looking into Windows Mobile development but there is one thing which I haven't quite figured out yet. In all applications already installed on the device (Internet Explorer, configuration windows, etc) whenever the on-screen (soft?) keyboard appears, the user interface automatically resizes so the keyboard doesn't cover or obscure the user interface (and if necessary it adds scroll bars).
However when I simply add a text box to my Windows Mobile form, somewhere near the bottom, and test it, it's not automatically resized. The keyboard covers the text box and I can no longer see what I am typing.
Is there a way to automatically do this, or should I do this myself using an InputPanel control and listening for its event?
This is all with .NET (the compact framework, I believe), C# and Windows Mobile Professional 6.1, by the way.
Use the InputPanel component. It contains a EnabledChanged event.
Simply handle the event and resize/hide/show your controls. :)
Example code can be found at the MSDN.
You will have to set the Anchor property for the control respectively. The form will be resized automatically because it is full-screen, but unless you tell your control to be anchored to the bottom, it will not move but be "outside" the form.
Example: You have a "fill client area" ListView and two buttons below that ListView. To make the ListView adjust its size and move the buttons according to the new height, set the ListView's anchor property to "Top, Left, Bottom, Right" and the buttons` anchor property to "Bottom, Left" and "Bottom, Right". That way you also account for screen rotation in that the controls resize/move correctly.
You'd have to listen to the InputPanel events only in case you want to entirely restructure your layout when the SIP is shown/hidden.
we can change the background of buttons and menu items n other UI components etc but is there a way to also change the background image for hover, pressed and other states
I do not think that is a good idea as a standard guideline for user interfaces has been adopted. Think what would happen if the user made a system setting change for the width of a window frame, or the border for the icons, or even worse, apply a theme that makes your user interface pretty glarish as a result of the perception of the eyes of the user, this can have a knock-on effect - the user will end up not using your application as a result.
It would be prudence to just leave the natural colours of buttons etc as defined by the system settings such as gray buttons, white background on text boxes etc. Then later on, once the winform application is accomplished, then find out by asking the users for their feedback on the layout and colouring schemes.
The best advice is to leave it alone, because by chance, a user will have their customised settings for graphics display, larger fonts (instead of 96dpi, could have extra large fonts).
The place to look for this is in:
Right click on the desktop
A popup menu appears, select properties and click on it.
A dialog box will appear, now click on the settings tab page.
It is on that tab page the font sizes, themes, borders and a whole host of customizations can take place.
Be wisse and practice safe caution here as I wouldn't go too far in making the application interface a colour playground as I have mentioned above. If you stick to my opinion of it, the application will be 'neutral' on the grounds that it will work with many themes and user settings as possible.
Anything is possible.
Override OnMouseHover, OnMouseEnter/Leave, OnPaint on the custom buttons... ;)