Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 Alignment Concerns

[BajiRav]

Here it is http://mobilitydigest.com/windows-8-net-code-contains-isappearlierthanwindowsphone8-code-hints-at-wp-apps-on-w8/

[George P Global Moderator]

Read this somewhere, you can still create a single solution is VS and include 2 projects.

So you can re-use all the back end code and have just different projects for the GUI part.

Which makes sense since the phone has a different form factor compared to a tablet or pc.

I also agree with this, I think some people just want to have that click/build and run everywhere type of setup but WP8 and WIn8 are targeting different hardware. Some of the stuff around the UI, like the panoramas the phone uses have no place on a Win8 tablet/laptop/pc. There is no need for that type of UI control, so why would you port the same app over from the phone without making those types of changes. I think by doing this MS is specifically forcing developers to think more about the UI between versions of their apps and make sure that they make better use of the hardware they'll run on instead of just having the thing scale up to fit a bigger screen etc.

[BajiRav]

I also agree with this, I think some people just want to have that click/build and run everywhere type of setup but WP8 and WIn8 are targeting different hardware. Some of the stuff around the UI, like the panoramas the phone uses have no place on a Win8 tablet/laptop/pc. There is no need for that type of UI control, so why would you port the same app over from the phone without making those types of changes. I think by doing this MS is specifically forcing developers to think more about the UI between versions of their apps and make sure that they make better use of the hardware they'll run on instead of just having the thing scale up to fit a bigger screen etc.

Pivots actually work pretty good on tablets. See the official Xbox app on iPad for example. :p (although I do understand your point).

[contextfree]

The problem with pivot / panorama in a Windows 8 context is that it involves scrolling in two dimensions. That doesn't work well with the cross-slide / swipe gesture that Windows 8 uses for selection and it also doesn't work well with the mouse and keyboard (can't use mousewheel or PgDn/PgUp to scroll everywhere.)

[rfirth]

The problem with pivot / panorama in a Windows 8 context is that it involves scrolling in two dimensions. That doesn't work well with the cross-slide / swipe gesture that Windows 8 uses for selection and it also doesn't work well with the mouse and keyboard (can't use mousewheel or PgDn/PgUp to scroll everywhere.)

Well, you could use panorama/pivot in Windows 8... it's no different from the current controls except that there are no titles for each section. With pivot, you can click on the titles and it will pivot to that page. That makes it mouse friendly. Otherwise, you have to scroll. Scrolling is nice, but you don't want to only support scrolling.

You could easily make a pivot or panorama control work with mousewheel or PgDn/PgUp if you wanted... it's not designed in such a way that it would break it.

I think this is the real problem with metro apps not being very mouse friendly... we need the pivot control. I hacked my own to include in my metro app and it's much much better for it.