Quote:
Originally Posted by jpijper
As far as I am concerned, your decision to adopt the panel approach is a big step backwards from a UI point of view. Is it possible that you might change your mind about this?
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Thankyou for your comments Jan, I am always glad to receive feedback - especially when it expressed so courteously :-)
As for Freda's design for dealing with multiple book sources, I do understand where you are coming from. My decision to switch away from the 'pivot' control was motivated by a few considerations:
1) The 'pivot' control is, I think, really meant for summary-detail, or data-filter relationships. I didn't see many other apps using it just as a way to list a series of different entities horizontally.
2) With the pivot setup, there is no obvious way to manage the list of book sources (so you end up needing a special page to 'manage the list of sources' - which is very inconsistent with metro's data-manipulation patterns).
3) The programming environment does not give you a good way to hide pivot-page tabs or switch them around.
4) Once you have more than 4 tabs on a pivot control, performance becomes flaky.
5) For some book sources you want to be able pan horizontally (viewing the whole of a long title, or panning around a web view). That interacts in a confusing way with the pivot control's horizontal scrolling gesture.
I am not actually very happy with the current setup either, and I will be making more changes to it. And since my main reason for switching is (4), I will be looking at performance on the new Mango OS version, since it may be that the performance issues have been fixed in that version. I may look at a layout based on a Panorama control, where the user gets to arrange their book sources any way they wish (horizontally, vertically, or a mixture).
Thanks again for the feedback,
And by the way, if you are interested in testing beta versions of the software, do let me know (email your Windows Live ID to me at
jim@turnipsoft.co.uk).
Jim