2. Using the Panorama Control in Blend
On Windows Phone, you are not limited to the size of the screen. The Panorama control in an application enables you to use a larger virtual space. Although you can use a Panorama control directly, one of the most common scenarios is to start with a new panorama application, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. New panorama application
After you create a new panorama application, your main page (MainPage.xaml) will consist primarily of a virtual area that contains one or more PanoramaItems. You can see this if you drill down into the Objects and Timeline panel for the panorama, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. PanoramaItems in the Objects and Timeline panel
The Panorama control user interface is made up of several parts, labeled 1–4 in Figure 7.
Figure 7. Panorama control user interface
The control itself is sized to contain all panorama items. This means the control is much larger than the screen but indicates to the user that more content is available (via the other panes overlapping on the side of the page), as indicated by the #1. The header (#2) shows the header for the current PanoramaItem. The #3 indicates the content area of an individual item. Lastly, the next item (#4) is shown to the right of the current item. This user experience is meant to help users learn your user interface by exploring the parts they can’t see in the virtual space on the phone.
In Blend, you can view each PanoramaItem as the “current” item by simply selecting it in the Objects and Timeline panel, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8. PanoramaItem selection
As the individual PanoramaItem is selected, you can manually edit the contents as you would in any other container (for example, Grid, Canvas, and so on). The actual PanoramaItem contains both a header and content. The header (usually just lowercase text) indicates to the user what the PanoramaItem contains. The content is the control(s) that represents the content of the PanoramaItem.
Adding new PanoramaItems to your Panorama control is just as easy as using the context menu, as shown in Figure 9.Figure 9. Adding a PanoramaItem
By adding multiple PanoramaItem objects to the Panorama control, you will be creating an increasingly larger virtual area for your application. As stated earlier, the rule of thumb is to only have four or five PanoramaItems in a Panorama control.
