What is the difference between the winphone 7 Panorama and Pivot Controls? To me they seem very similar, apart from the slightly different visual appearance.
In which situations should one or the other be used?
There is a video on Channel 9 with Amy Alberts and Chad Roberts that talks about the differences between the Panorama and Pivot controls and when you should use each.
In my opinion, the Panorama control is for when you need to create a "hub"-type application (like the Games hub) that acts primarily as a jumping point and offers summary information for the rest of the application. The Pivot is used in much the same way that you would use a tab control on other platforms.
As said above, the Panorama control is really meant for rich Hub type look .. smooth multi-screen scrolling with Parallax effect, ideally including images in the views. The Pivot control is more for presenting slices of the related data to the user or categorizing the content .. the in-built emails & calendar are examples. Both controls are very suited for dynamic data-binding.
Jeff Blankenburg, one of the MSFT evangelists wrote two nice posts explaining their use:
http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/post/31-Days-of-Windows-Phone-7.aspx
Hope this helps!
I would use the Panorama control if the content of your application lends itself to being presented in a format where you think of the screen as being a window into a larger page...one that can loop back around to the beginning. Also, consider whether that content needs to support gestures, especially swipes, because those will cause conflicts between some action intended to take place in a control, for example a map with panning, and the "outer" Panorama control's behavior of scrolling.
I'm also reconsidering using the Pivot control. It has a more distinct division between sections of content than Panorama does and I like both the gesture swiping to switch between pivots and the animation. However, it has caused some tombstoning problems and with the advent of copy-and-paste there could be a conflict between the user trying to select content to copy and the triggering of the swipe gesture to switch pivots. Disabling the Pivot Control swipe gesture talks about a possible work-around, although I haven't tried it and see from the comments below that article that there may be some other issues.
Related
i'm making a universal app for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 and i'd like to know what is the control in a windows app which work like the PIVOT in WP.
I found this picture in the msdn site http://assets.windowsphone.com/ec9dcbf2-d057-4d2d-a627-01565d2ff76a/WSA_Design_L2_1_UniquelyWindows_ModernDesign_702x394px_InvariantCulture_Default.jpg
on the picture you can see a menu on top, i imagine that if you click on "Timer", the main screen would slide to the left to make room for the main screen for "Timer".
It's the most pivot-like that i found but i don't know what is used to do that.
Thanks in advance and sorry for my english, hard to find the right words when you don't know how it's called >< !
You can use FlipView control and place grids in it. It's not same as Pivot though, putting title on page items like PivotHeaders will be a little harder. But still there is almost a work around.
There isn't a direct equivalent. The point of the pivot is to break up the UI into phone screen-sized parts; you don't needs this so much on the tablet/PC.
The hub app template is the closest starting point, but really you should probably design your app as if all the pivots are open at once and spread out horizontally.
Use a grid control with several more sub-grids within it. Or you may want to redesign your layout completely for larger screens. You'll need to put the controls within a scrollviewer in order to let the user scroll left/right on screens that won't fit it all at once.
I have a NavBarControl which contains collection of NavBarGroups.
NavBarGroup have a header and container control. NavBarGroups can be collapsed/expanded.
The button to expand/collapse is on right side. By default it looks like double up/down arrow. I want to customize this button to change its look and feel to indicate collapsed/expanded state.
(using Devexpress in Windows Forms)
For future reference, the self-help and online support at DevExpress is exceptionally thorough, and they will answer questions like this for paid subscribers within 24 hours, usually with a code sample.
In this case there are two ways to achieve your goal (assuming you're on a relatively recent version of DevExpress) as described here.
The "right way" to do what you want is to make a custom skin with your own icons; you can use their skin editor to open your current skin, make changes, and save it. Nearly every aspect of the look & feel of their controls is skinned and you can make pretty significant changes to them.
Deploying custom skins isn't all that complex but it might be a bit overkill for the effect you're trying to achieve. The other option is to custom draw the group caption. There's a sample attached to that post that is a working example of doing so, but you basically implement the CustomDrawGroupCaption event and do your own painting, including whatever icons you want based on the group's state.
How can i manage Autorotation Windows 8 Apps.
I have gone through the "Rotation" Sample from MSDN but it is hell lot confusing, what I need to do is , I need to have completely different view when in Portrait and a diiferent one in Landscape.
I have designed my view for Landscape when I need to make changes for Portrait View. I need a way to dynamically switch between to views of re-shuffle the views.
By far the easiest way to deal with this is to inherit your page from LayoutAwarePage instead of Page and leverage the Visual State Manager inside of Expression Blend to do all of the work for you.
I have a full article with lots of pictures and a downloadable sample application here:
http://jaredbienz.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/wp-to-w8-view-states-using-visual-state-manager/
You're definitely going to want to use a FlipView control here. I don't know if you're using JavaScript/HTML5 or C#/XAML, but it is available in either case.
There's a great sample on MSDN to show you how to do it, but without more context on your issue, I don't know how much more I can assist.
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/FlipView-control-sample-18e434b4
You can handle orientation changes in two basic ways...
1) The brute force approach. Wire into the orientationchanged event...
Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.OrientationChanged += DisplayProperties_OrientationChanged;
In the event handle, check the orientation and navigate to a page that has been specifically layout out for that orientation...
if (Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.CurrentOrientation == DisplayOrientations.Portrait)
this.Frame.Navigate(typeof(PortraitPage));
Pros... easy to design pages optimized for given orientations
Cons... need to handle navigation and state data between pages
2) Create a single page that changes its layout using visual states. You would still wire into the orientationchanged event, but make calls to VisualStateManager.GoToState(this,"Portrait",true).or something similar depending on how you name your visual states.
Pros... change layout without navigation and you can add cool animations easily
Cons... more complex layout could be harder if you are not comfortable with advanced xaml layouts and viewStates
If you look at the sample templates (besides blank) they include a LayoutAwarePage that handles the viewstate transitions for you, simplifying things a bit.
I have an idea for a personal project. And I know one way of accomplishing it in Windows Forms (which I no longer wish to use). Basically I could (in WinForms) just draw everything onto the screen (Form) and then when I need to switch views/states of the application, just redraw the new stuff in the old stuff's place.
But how can we have different states in WPF? Is there a "right" or "proper" way of doing this? Is something like this covered somewhere in the docs?
I'd like to do my own searching, but I have no idea what exactly to look for, and current attempts at finding the right information, so far have yielded no helpful (or even relevant) results.
Any help at all will be greatly appreciated. I am new to WPF, but have been making a lot of progress this past week!
Thank you!
P.S.:
I just thouhght of something. If the solution was to draw what is needed for one screen, and when it is time to display the next screen, just dispose of/hide everything and create/display the new stuff, then how would we get around this? Because we can't/shouldn't change XAML markup at runtime, can/should we? :/
Not sure how you drawn your views/states in WinForms (direct painting on a Graphics object?).
The closest to what you're describing is the VisualStateManager. You can use it to statically define several visual states inside a single XAML and transit between them (using a smooth animation if you want).
If what you've done was show different Forms with Show/ShowDialog(), then the equivalent would be to use different Windows and Show/Hide them.
If you just cleared/added Controls to your form, then you can do just the same in WPF. Most Controls in WPF have a Content or Children property instead of Control.Controls in Forms.
I don't know if I understand what you really want. But here are my thoughts:
You can use several Windows and Show/Hide them accordingly
You can use the Frame/Page functionality in WP (MSDN)
if you really need to you could load your XAML and remove the topmost content in your Window and replace it with the loaded content
You could use the VisualStateGroup functionality to change the appearance of your current window
I think you will be happy with the second solution
I'm building a control that comprises 15x15 = 225 buttons, and needs to be resizable. Because it's a grid, anchoring and docking won't work. I've tried both TableLayoutPanel as well as handling the resize event to manually place and size controls. In both cases, resizing is unacceptably slow. Suspend/Resume Layout in the resize function when I'm manually handling the layout doesn't help.
Is there something fundamental that I can change to speed things up, or is this just a limitation of the native controls? I understand I can build a custom control from scratch, handling the clicks and painting myself -- though I'd prefer to stick with the native controls if possible.
Edit
I know it's a lot of buttons. My question is a technical one; not one about UI design.
WinForms doesn't handle displaying this many controls at the same time unfortunately.
If I were in your situation I would first consider if I could split up the form in several pages. In many cases that would be easier to understand for the user as well.
But in your case that doesn't seem to be an option. Are you making something like a minesweeper style game? There you have a grid of buttons that all are clickable. In such a situation I would suggest you go for a custom owner drawn control where you consolidate all the buttons in one control. Don't build a composite control that contains 225 buttons - that won't help at all :-)
A final option could be to switch to WPF. WPF uses hardware accelerated rendering so it may be faster, but with so many controls not even that may help.