Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 4. Adding Motion

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Why motion is such an important consideration when building Windows Phone applications

• What visual states are and how to transition between them

• How animation can be used to transition between states

• Using the panoramic and pivot controls to build a consistent user experience

If you look at most computers, you'll see that they are designed for individuals sitting at desks. Mobile phones, however, are not most computers — they have become an integral part of our life in motion. Users have come to expect their mobile phones to keep up with where they are and what they are doing. They also expect an experience that matches the way they live through the creative use of motion within the applications.

Motion can be expressed through varying the visual state to reflect some form of interaction, through animation of controls or data, or through the smooth transition between pages and views. In this chapter, you will learn how to build and use visual states and animation, as well as how to build panoramic and pivot views as used by the Windows Phone platform.

VISUAL STATE MANAGEMENT

You may be wondering what state management has to do with adding motion and animation to your application. The truth is that animations are commonly used to transition between two distinct visual states of an application or control. In fact, animations are commonly described in terms of a start and an end state. Before you can construct an animation, you need to know how ...