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ScatterView

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The Photos app is one of the most popular ones to demo. People really love the type of natural interactions it enables.

David Anson was so inspired that he wrote a Silverlight demo with similar behavior. Miguel de Icaza then expanded on that to do an impressive demo of the Moonlight project. Those are both pretty cool, but manipulating photos with a mouse isn’t nearly as much fun or intuitive as using your hands. Plus, David & Miguel had to write a bunch of code just to handle some basic manipulations. Using the WPF layer of the Surface SDK, here’s an equivalent that I quickly whipped up in Expression Blend:

<s:SurfaceWindow

      xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

      xmlns:s="https://schemas.microsoft.com/surface/presentation">

      <s:ScatterView>

            <Image Source="Toco Toucan.jpg"/>

            <Image Source="Green Sea Turtle.jpg"/>

            <Image Source="Desert Landscape.jpg"/>

      </s:ScatterView>

</s:SurfaceWindow>

ScatterView is a custom ItemsControl in our SDK which apps can databind or populate with any type of content. Simply sticking some Image elements in it gives you a basic Photos-like app without writing any code. By baking common manipulations into WPF SDK controls like this, we’re able to free developers up to focus on things that are unique to their apps while designers use Blend to add some custom pizazz.

VIDEO: By the way, we just posted a video online showing off a bit of the SDK, including the ScatterView control. Let us know what you think - if people enjoy these, I'll try to do more.

-Robert

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2007
    Very cool video!!! Definite a great way to show off the SDK and demonstrate that is going to be very easy to write Surface apps! Tell us more about the SDK! Tell us more!!! When will we be able to download it? Thanks for posting this! Keep it up!

  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2007
    Great video, Robert. Please do more of those for sure. Rob Bushway GottaBeSurface.com

  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2007
    Sliding your hand across the surface sounds nothing like I'd expect- almost like sliding a hand across cardboard. I suppose this is due to some sort of surface treatment (no pun intended) intended to decrease sliding friction, but also does it perhaps reduce finger prints and smudges? Anyway, more to the point, this is EXACTLY what the next generation of Tablet PCs needs. Developers need access to gestures and multitouch and physiscs with only 5 lines of code, so they concentrate on the things that matter most.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2007
    After watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg on the Android Demo, I have to say

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2007
    Very Very impressed with the technology, i would love to know how i get my hands on some hardware to test and get ready to push this to the European Market, The video you did made it look so easy, you showed the scatterview , please could we get some idea of how many controls their is and what other controls do. If you get some free time more short videos like that would be much appreciated, When will we be able to get are hands on this as developers and potential companies wishing to drive this technology tio the market. best regards, Patrick

  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2007
    Can we hope to see more SDK videos?