ISurfaceScrollInfo and you, Part Zero.

I’ve been working on this secret project with a colleague of mine, and one part of the project is to create a custom panel for the Surface. So what’s so special about the panel I’m doing? I’m want to replicate the “page panel” found on the iPhone and the Android phones. To clarify, I do not know the official name of the panel but I will call it page panel until someone either tell me the official name or come up with a better name. 

So what is the definition of a page panel? I would say these points would define it:

• Only one item has focus. Other items might be seen but only one will be focused. I will explain in more detail what focus really mean when the time comes.
• When the focus moves to another item the panel is animated. Just like the mobile versions (see the youtube-link above).
• The items are arranged on a straight line, either horizontally or vertically. No wrapping with other words. I will implement horizontal support because that’s what I want, but it shouldn’t be any problem implementing vertical arrangement as well, both from a developers and a user experiences point of view.
• Changing the item focus are done by the user using finger contacts (or any contact?). I have proposed to trigger focus change contact up, if the contact is out of a certain bound. We’ll get to this later.

A custom panel with custom scrolling, or to be more concrete: inherit from Panel and implement the ISurfaceScrollInfo interface. The guys at the Surface Community recommended me to look at the LoopingPanel, which does exactly that!

I have decided to split my story into several parts, just to make it more exciting and to avoid writing the longest blog post in the history of man. This part is an introduction. The next part will be about implementing a custom Panel, but later on I will tell you about implementing the ISurfaceScrollInfo.

To be continued…