Top Ranked – Control Feedback on Tap

In this episode, I focus on another small tweak that developers can add to their apps that will help make those apps look a lot more like native apps.  I’m referring to the addition of the Tilt Effect to controls.  By default, when you add controls to the canvas in Visual Studio or Expression Blend they do not get the tilt effect.  This may seem like a small thing but as I’ve mentioned before the experience is something that users will notice and their ratings and as a result your rankings will be affected by that. 

View or download the video on Channel 9 (includes higher quality video)

The thing is, that there is, in fact, a really easy way to add the tilt effect to your apps using the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit .  You can grab the source code for that from Codeplex or, even easier, you can just pull it in to your project and reference it using Nuget.

Adding the Tilt Effect is as simple as adding the namespace for the toolkit and then adding the effect to either the individual controls or to the entire page.  In most cases it shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds on each of the pages in your project so there’s really no reason for you not to take advantage of this.

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about any of the videos, about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note the contact form on my blog here:
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

Technorati Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone Development,wpdev,Windows Phone Marketplace,Control Feedback,Silverlight Toolkit,Tilt Effect

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2012
  Hello Ben,I've made it even easier for designers to add the tilt effect and page transitions to their pages by creating a Blend behavior for the Toolkit features so you can just drag the tilt effect behavior to a page and all controls will get the tilt effect (also works on single control and there is also a suppress tilt effect behavior)you can check out the codeplex project here:phonetoolkitbehavior.codeplex.comand my blog with a tutorial here:vdcruijsen.net/.../tutorial-how-to-use-the-silverlight-toolkit-transitions-without-writing-xaml-by-using-the-toolkit-behavior-extensions
• Anonymous
  March 08, 2012
  @GeertNice work, Geert.  Thanks for sharing.