Pivot and Panorama pages make for a great main page for your Windows Phone
7 (WP7). These pages allow you to provide various levels of swiping left and
right to provide more capabilities to a single page. The simplest way to take
advantage of WP7 Pivot and Panorma Pages is to create a project using the Windows
Phone Pivot Application or Windows
Phone Panorama Application templates; however, to really understand these
pages you need to understand how these page work in order to fully utilize
them.
Pivot Pages
The pivot page is similar to using tab on other platforms. It essentially
allows you to provide multiple views within a single page. The user can easily
navigate between these views by swiping left or right. It is a very natural UI
that is very useful for data centric applications. The different views are a
very natural way to allow the user to filter data or view similar lists, which makes
sense for data intensive apps. To insert a Pivot control into a page you need
to understand a couple of elements. The root element of the pivot control is as
follows:
<controls:Pivot Title="Page Title"> </controls:Pivot>
As you can see the one item you need to define at the Pivot control level is
the title. This title is essentially the title of the page provided you plan to
use Pivot control to fill the page. Within the opening/closing Pivot control
tags you will need to include one or more Pivot Items. Each pivot item is
defined by the pivot defined by the following tag:
<controls:PivotItem Header="first"> </controls:PivotItem>
The Pivot Item defines an individual view within the Pivot control. The one
attribute you need to provide for each PivotItem is the Header, which
essentially defines the tab name. Next you will want to populate the PivotItem
with the content you want to display. The most common control to be included
within a PivotItem is a ListBox control; however, you can put just about
anything within a PivotItem. The important thing to note is that the PivotItem
width is limited to the screen size.
Panorama Page
The Panorama Page is somewhat similar to the Pivot Page; however,
PanoramaItems are not bound to the screen width. The Panorama control allows
you to create a user interface, which uses the horizontal tab style, but can be
far more flexible and immersive. The Panorama control is often configured to
use a background image, which scrolls at a slightly different speed from the
foreground producing a 2d effect. To get started we first need to create a
Panorma control as defined by the following tags:
<controls:Panorama Title="my application"> </controls:Panorama>
As you can see you can also define the Title of the Panorama control in the
root element. Items within a Panorama are defined similar to those of a Pivot
control as shown below.
<controls:PanoramaItem Header="header title"> </controls:PanoramaItem>
The definition of a Panorama Item is similar to a Pivot Item in that it
includes the Header for the item. Within the Panorama Item you then would need
to include whatever controls you want to display within this item. And similar
to the Pivot Item it is common to use List Boxes; however, the Panorama
includes a couple of features that allow you to expand upon the user interface.
Conclusion
Both the Pivot and Panorama pages provide you with the user interface
components necessary to use as main user interface for your application. The
Pivot seems to work best for data centric applications such as Email or list
based. The Panorama provides similar capabilities; however, since it allows for
items to span pages you can use it to display wider information such as Photos
or a grid of photos. Both controls provide the capabilities necessary to
support your application as the main user interface.
