Could some Advise or give tips on how the Windows Store apps are designed?
How are the long scrolling horizontal controls made (is it Canvas)?
My needs are to make simple apps for presentation of info and simple controls for calculations for use by Medical and Science students This style is prefered.
Are there any third party add-ons with templates to make my life easier?
What I have learned so far from the introduction to Xojo programming eBook (which helped me greatly) I could design the program to mimic that effect but I would not dare show it to a programmer as the program would be at least 10 times larger then it should be and break all the rules of programming.
No one may know once the program is compiled but I want to become better programmer.
Any tip is appreciated.
[quote=211683:@Chris Salonikas]Could some Advise or give tips on how the Windows Store apps are designed?
How are the long scrolling horizontal controls made (is it Canvas)?
My needs are to make simple apps for presentation of info and simple controls for calculations for use by Medical and Science students This style is prefered.
Are there any third party add-ons with templates to make my life easier?
What I have learned so far from the introduction to Xojo programming eBook (which helped me greatly) I could design the program to mimic that effect but I would not dare show it to a programmer as the program would be at least 10 times larger then it should be and break all the rules of programming.
No one may know once the program is compiled but I want to become better programmer.
Any tip is appreciated.[/quote]
I have worked quite a bit on that but it would take much too long in the forum.
You may want to look at Design Basics and Guidelines from Microsoft here which tells you a lot of what should be done.
I do not know exactly what you mean by " long scrolling horizontal controls". If you mean something that looks a it like the Windows Store display that scrolls horizontally with the mouse wheel, that can be obtained with a canvas. But the more specific you are, the easier it will be to assist.
I am not aware of any third party, but in my experience, Windows Store apps use standard Windows controls. I have half a dozen of them in there (real, actual Modern API apps), but it would be easy to emulate them in Xojo IMHO.
Thanks for the link Michel.
What I meant with the long horizontal scrolling is as you understood, display that scrolls horizontally with the mouse wheel.
Any hint on how the scrolling is done, I could not find much in the reference library.
Could you tell me the names of some of your app in the windows store to look at?
There maybe one that may interest me and at least I can offer some support.
Thanks again for your guide.
Wouldn’t that make a great article or even a series of articles for xDev?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an area for such articles in this forum?
That was the plan, and I have started putting things down, but all depends on a current Windows project I have in Xojo for the Windows Store. Since Windows 10, Xojo apps cannot be listed in the Windows Store as they used to with Windows 8, so that stopped my project in its tracks, until next year when Centennial Bridge will enable packaging Win32 apps in a UWP shell.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uk_faculty_connection/archive/2015/05/02/universal-windows-platform-bridges.aspx
I am registered for beta, and apparently the program has started (unlike iOS, Android and Web bridges), but apart from “next year”, Microsoft has not provided any indications as to when that will become reality.
I shall resume work on the app soon, though. After back to school (big time for School Fonts). My goal is to provide a very clear way of proceeding to devise a Modern UI using mostly standard Xojo controls, taken from my own experience redesigning an app. At present my app is built that way, apart from a custom on screen keyboard (in Xojo) I had to devise in replacement to the two built-in ones that one can call in code, but with no way to hide it afterward.
[quote=211707:@Chris Salonikas]Thanks for the link Michel.
What I meant with the long horizontal scrolling is as you understood, display that scrolls horizontally with the mouse wheel.
Any hint on how the scrolling is done, I could not find much in the reference library.[/quote]
That can be done in Xojo using a Canvas as container, which means you place a very wide canvas on your window (it will go out of the window area), and place your controls onto it. When you do so you will notice the canvas has a red ring around it, meaning it becomes parent of the controls.
Then you want to use the MouseWheel event of the canvas to see what happens with the wheel, and use the Scroll Method to scroll the canvas. When you do so, controls that have been placed onto it will follow. The example at http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/Canvas.Scroll give you a pretty good idea about what to do. It uses keys, but you can use MouseWeel DeltaY to move the canvas along X. http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/RectControl.MouseWheel
[quote]
Could you tell me the names of some of your app in the windows store to look at?
There maybe one that may interest me and at least I can offer some support.
Thanks again for your guide.[/quote]
Look for “Handwriting Fonts”, or “Calligraphic Fonts” in the Windows Store, for instance.
Thanks Michel for all that, it should now get me started.
It was late here in Australia on my last post, (1 am) and didn’t get much sleep trying to work it out.
Now I can sleep early tonight. It is the help from all you experience programmers that prevent beginners like me from getting discouraged (enjoying Xojo).