WP7 Toolkit: Combining Hubtile, Listbox, Tilt, ContextMenu and WrapPannel

Found a much clearer set of how-to’s by windows phone geek here.

This is a post for the developers out there. I wanted to use the hubtile control from the wp7 silverlight toolkit, but along side it also use the context menu from the same toolkit, while having the whole lot databound inside a listbox. It took me a while to come up with a solution that I was happy with. I’m not sure if it’s following best practices but it seems to work well for what I want. The solution is to use a wrappannel from the same toolkit and then to place this inside “ItemsPanelTemplate” of the listbox. This means that the listbox items that are bound then appear within the wrappanel while still being part of the listbox. Then the context menu and the hubtile control can be put inside the “ItemTemplate”, coupled with the tilt animation, yet again from the toolkit, you end up with a nice tilt-y and scrollable set of hubtiles that have a long press context menu associated with them. If you’re curious to see how it all looks, the finished product is included in my latest beta of BBC News Mobile. Hopefully this is a useful how-to for, it’s my first shot at once of these so go easy!

BBC News Beta 2.6.5 – Gui Tweaks

Thanks for the continued testing. Hopefully the app is now getting nearer to the release candidate, although this is a more experimental build.

Changes in this build:

• Increased to performance
• Changes to feed Gui
• Improvements to the Offline reader
• Fontsize tweaks
• Screen orientation lock

Really interested to hear what you think of the new feeds gui on the home page, get the latest xap here.

BBC News Beta – 2.6.4

This is my latest build with a couple of new features and changes. I’m currently traveling so have been doing bits of bobs along the way on planes and in cafe’s with free wifi. Hopefully haven’t made too many mistakes. New Features Include:

• Scalable fonts via the app bar when reading an article
• Pivot for the feeds to allow easy change between feeds
• Changes to backgrounds and live tiles to improve the look and feel
• General tweaks to increase stability and Speed

As always let me know how you get on and if you have any suggestions. New build is available here

Also if anyone has a good suggestions of places to go/eat/see in Melbourne or Sydney let me know

BBC News Mobile

Just a quick post, I’ve made some changes to the live tile images. Hopefully it now looks a bit better, let me know what you think.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.