Saturday, April 28, 2007
About cube controls for WPF
Telerik has announced their Cube demo...
I know that with WPF the designers can free their minds, but... came on! I don't want to push the faces of the cube with my mouse! This kind of crazy-graphic-designer-made controls are only giving more arguments to Jacob Nielsen against the 3D (see 2D is Better Than 3D and Top 10 Bloopers for two examples, or look for "3D" in UseIt.com if you want more).
Some time ago, last year, while searching for early WPF controls, I found this cube calendar (Selector3D) made by Ricciolo. I didn't want to be less, so, I developed a control for Himalia using this free cube control. Now, is time to show it.
The control works like a 3D tab, just this, when you press the links the content moves in a cube-like to show the next content, but it's SO COOL when you play with the back and forward buttons! I must confess that I spent like 20 minutes just going forward and backwards the first time I ran it ;)
Believe me, you can't stop of pressing Back and Forward. And that goes even worst, when you notice that got all this stuff with just one drag & drop in the designer, and that it's full reusable, and...
Just in case, the Navigation and Layout models for this example are the following:
The container control is the "red hollow rectangle" in the navigation model, and it means that all the elements within it will be presented using one only control. In this case, we selected the Cube control to do this task. Obviously, the control should know how to present that navigational path, but it is defined in its contract.
But don't be anxious, we will include this control in the next release...
Labels: Controls, Himalia, Usability, WPF
