ScatterView

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