UI Components for Windows Mobile Applications (.NET Compact Framework)

Question

Applications which run on mobile devices have special user interface requirements. I think Apple did a great job introducing innovative controls on the iPhone/iPod touch platfor

Answer 1

I picked up Mirabyte's Touch Controls v1.0 offering on the weekend.
[Version 1.5 has now been released]

The positive:

• When you get it working, it can look very nice and the kinetic scrolling is nice.
• You get swiping left and right to go back and forth.
• Questions asked on the forum seem to be answered pretty quickly.
• You can do alpha transparent images using their resource based image
• They seem to be doing a lot of work to improve things requested on the forums.

The negative

• The architecture used in the demo isn't what I consider best practice. (There's a single PageHandler class that handles everything from spinning up buttons, pages, menus etc that's split using partial classes across 5 files).
• There's no documentation or comments.
• The mechanisms for using transparent images are heavily reliant on strings, lack of dynamic ways of using your own images.
• It's a very list based UI you're likely to end up with which may or may not be to your taste.
• Few entry points for inherited controls, no source.

All in all, I'd recommend them, they give you a nice way of creating iPhone like UIs. Just be aware there are still teething problems and a lack of documentation.

Answer 2

You may also consider looking into SlideUI .NET CF UI Controls our company use for Win Mobile development. It contains a rich list of design-time available controls optimized for fingers (buttons, edits, paintbox, kinetic scrolling list, etc.) Visit SlideUI's website at www.devslide.com/products/slideui

Answer 3

I tried Mirabyte and SlideUI. I downloaded and played with both of them. The SlideUI controls (1.6) are really good, and I have to say I am impressed. I'm setting up a student license from them now. I would recommend this for anyone looking for an easier way to make a nice looking app without having to create your own designs and controls.

Answer 4

If you're looking for iPhone like GUI on Windows Mobile, take a look at Bee Mobile at http://beemobile4.net

They offer their iPack - a pack of .NET CF controls which provide iPhone-like GUI.

Answer 5

We've faked a lot of static animations by creating .png sequences in adobe after effects and then rotating the images within a Picture box.

Answer 6

There's also an open source project called Fluid Controls. They live here. There's an implementation here.

Looks like you can create some nice interfaces with it, however it does require quite a lot of code to do.

For example, to create a list requires an inherited ListBox class with a Template that explicitly creates and positions all your controls.

Still, a good way to go if you don't want to fork out 50 euro for Mirabyte or 600 dollars for Roscos tools.