Chapter 4
User Interfaces
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Understanding WP7 UI principles
- Building a UI
- Customizing a UI
The touch user interface (UI), one in which the user interacts with the device and applications by using the touch gesture on the display screen, now is the UI for modern smartphones. Windows Phone 7 (WP7) introduces its touch UI based on a design system codenamed Metro, which is completely different from its predecessors. While the Metro UI concept is new to every mobile application developer, it’s based on Silverlight, a powerful development platform for creating interactive user experiences for web, desktop, and mobile applications. Thus it is quite straightforward to port existing Silverlight applications to the WP7 platform. The new UI is one of the most exciting changes in WP7.
This chapter is all about creating UI on WP7. Three topics are discussed:
- UI design guidelines
- Basic steps of generating the UI
- Device UI customization
We start with UI design guidelines, followed by detailed information about UI elements and controls, UI system behaviors, and the interaction model for the touch interface. This chapter also covers common tasks to customize the UI for WP7 applications. Because the UI itself could be a very broad topic and WP7 is based on Silverlight, this chapter doesn’t discuss every detail about each control or about Silverlight programming; instead, the chapter focuses on the key WP7 UI concepts and comparisons with Android and iOS.
UI DESIGN PRINCIPLES ...
