Ranting and raving about anything I feel like complaining about.

On Design Paradigms for Windows Phone 7

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Windows Phone 7

I recently finished my Blood Sugar monitoring app ("Stay Glucose to Me") for the Windows Phone 7. I battled with the idea of which of the Metro styles to use for my application. Since the new Windows Phone 7 tools shipped with a Panorama control, I started there. What I find most interesting about the iterations of design I went through was how a real app can use (and probably should) use a couple of different metaphors. I could easily see a Pivot or Panorama for a home page then individual pages (that might still have individual simple pages).

For the application, I ended up using the pivot for my landing page of the application so I could show the raw data and graphs but then use page navigation to go to other pages. For example, here is a simple page layout of the blood monitoring application:

Application Layout

This means that even though I started with a Pivot application, there was quite a lot of work making all of the user interfaces, not just he landing page. This makes me think that many apps will really be a mix of all of these different types of controls. While there are Pivot and Panorama application templates, I think it will be more common to use these as 'controls' in a larger sense of mature apps. Though because it is a phone, these apps do have a logical maximum size.

Like I've talked about in other posts, I decided that in this example to use a Pivot instead of the Panorama mostly for performance reasons. The Pivot can be more virtualized for longer lists of information. In my case, I wasn't sure how many graphs I was going to support so I wanted to be able to virtualize the individual pages (via Load and Unload events) to lower memory utilization. That is simply not available in Panorama.  I've heard several times from different people that you shouldn't use more than four or five panes on a Panorama page because the total size of the page will really hammer the phone. Even the background on the Panorama (which looks cool) can be pretty memory intensive as it is converted into a bitmap so when drawn on the surface its taking a lot of memory (even if your image is small, its still turns it into a full-color image on the device).

I've had a lot of fun with this app and it will be a free application on the Marketplace once it opens up.

 

 
 

Comments

Gravatar Hey Now Shawn,

Nice Post!

Thx 4 the info,
Catto
Catto (Posted Wednesday, October 06, 2010)
Gravatar Shawn, I've grown very disapointed with WP7.

The lack of initial carriers, especially Verizon, where Apple will strike early next year.

The missing features, too numerous to name. While our management is telling customers(and internally) that WP7's initial offering is a "Don't Buy" because the next version will be a lot better(except minimal quantities for testing).

Maybe we're in the minority of "Mostly Windows" shops, but all these things taken together, have bummed me out!

Can somebody talk me down before I jump(lol).
Fallon (Posted Friday, October 08, 2010)
Gravatar Fallon,

I can't promise you anything yet...but couple of things to know:

- This phone is missing just about 2 features AFAIAC. Before you see apps, it'll be hard to see the whole story.
- If your "too numerous to count" features are developer features, I feel your pain...but I think mostly WinMo guys are feeling that pain because the platform is so different.
- The early ads I've seen make me think they have a shot of making this a great platform, but only time will tell.
- I am pretty committed to the platform so my opinions are not unbiased.
- Using a phone now for a month or so, I like it a lot. Except for GPS features (which I think apps will fill), I am ready to kick my Android to the curb.
- Verizon/Sprint: Unfortunately that's a side effect of having to pick GSM only (as for a world-wide launch is was the right decision). I expect CDMA phones to hit pretty quick in 2011 though.
- The trick here is different from Android and WinMo in that (like Apple) Microsoft is responsible for handling OS updates directly. This means that as they interate (think of the cycles are similar to the speed of the Silverlight team), they can push out OS updates pretty painlessly. This was not the case with WinMO and isn't the case for Android where you ahve to get the carrier and hardware companies involved which slows things down (and carrier's don't want upgrades since they want you to sign a new contract).

Did any of that help?
Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Friday, October 08, 2010)

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