Essential Windows Phone 8, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Designing for the Phone

Up to this point you have learned about the phone, worked your way through a simple walkthrough of an application, and learned the basics of XAML. Now you should be starting to think about the nature of the application you want to write. Although it is easy to think of this as just another XAML platform, it’s not nearly that simple. In this chapter we talk about the nature of designing for Windows Phone to help you make those hard decisions.

The Third Screen

Microsoft has pushed an idea it calls “three screens and a cloud”¹ since the earliest announcements of Windows Phone (and possibly before). Essentially this is the idea that an application or service should support three fundamental user experiences: computer, ...