I am currently writing a WPF application for consumption by tablet devices via Citrix (not my choice and not flexible…). In so far as is possible I would like to make the user interface tablet friendly. I was wondering if there are any controls similar to those employed by iOS or android devices available for WPF. Obviously free is better but is not a requirement.
I should add that I am particularly interested in the combobox replacement control and other controls that make user interaction easier on this form factor…
From what I can see it seems that microsoft are working on it… The next version of windows: ‘Windows 8‘ is going to be designed for a touch interface so I’m guessing that when they get round to releasing the SDK all of the controls will be touch ready. Unfortunately the windows 8 sdk probably wont be released for at least 4 months so this probably isn’t your best solution. Here are some workarounds while we all wait for it to come out…
Microsoft has only recently realised it has some serious catching up to do in the world of touch. The main difference between touch and using a mouse is that touch uses gestures such as sweeping your finger to scroll, pinch to zoom etc. There has been a wave of windows 7 tablets that have supported the scrolling feature but I can only tell you that second hand. I imagine that creating a normal WPF ScrollViewer with a load of items and running it on one of these tablets will respond to these gestures. I had a quick look through control panel on my laptop though and I couldn’t find any settings to do with gestures. 🙁
The other important thing about touch is that the buttons must be bigger. This can be done very easily just by increasing the size of all the buttons, but increasing the size of sliders, comboxes etc requires using WPF styles. These are reasonably well documented and basically allow you to customise the look of a control and also give it some simple behaviours (how they look when clicked and so on). In your case styles could be used to make all of your slider controls look big and chunky and combo boxes contain massive, finger sized items for use with fingers. Expression blend sports a set of simple styles that are very easy to edit and I recommend you use those to make your tablet style controls. Also, if the gestures mentioned in the previous paragraph end up being a wild goose chase. It may be worth making a custom control inheriting ScrollViewer that contains a bit of code that gives the scroll viewer a velocity but I can imagine that quickly turning into a challenge… 🙁
Lastly, text input is essential for applications. Windows comes with an on-screen keyboard and also a handwriting recogniser and I recommend you try and use that instead of trying to implement your own.
I hope this helps. Overall, if you can afford to sit still for a while wait for Windows 8. Otherwise try and use the limited range of features available for windows 7. I am sure that there will be a third-party control library somewhere if you need some extra zing…