[This documentation is preliminary and is subject to change.]
In Windows 8 Release Preview, a view is the way in which the content of your Windows Metro style UI adapts to how the Metro style apps is accessed and manipulated by a user. An app that is designed to support multiple views will work well on devices of various sizes and orientations, and will let users manipulate the content to fit their needs and preferences.
View state
View state refers to the three ways a user can choose to display your Metro style apps: snap, fill, and full-screen as shown in the following images.
| View state | Description |
|---|---|
| Full screen | App fills entire screen.
|
| Snap | App is snapped to a narrow region of the entire screen.
|
| Fill | App fills remaining screen area not occupied by the app in the snapped state.
|
Because users can work with up to two apps at a time, you should provide layouts that are fluid and flexible enough to support all three states.
When you plan for full screen, snap, and fill views, your app's UI will reflow smoothly and gracefully to accommodate screen size, orientation, and user interactions.
Screen orientation
Users can rotate and flip their tablets, slates, and monitors, so ensure that your app can handle both landscape and portrait orientations.
User interactions
Great apps help users do what they want with the content in the UI.
When you design your app, you should consider which regions of the UI should support panning and scrolling, optical and semantic zooming, and object resizing.
Create views that let users resize and zoom in on the content of your app.
Let the UI surface overflow the screen area onto additional "pages" if necessary. In these cases, enable panning and scrolling to let users explore these large UI surfaces and discover the content on the additional pages.
In this section
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
|
Windows scales applications to ensure consistent physical sizes for UI elements regardless of the pixel density of the screen. This topic outlines how to build an app with a layout and images that look great when scaled. | |
|
This topic describes best practices for how to design and build a layout for your Metro style app using JavaScript that scales to the different sizes of screens supported by Windows 8. | |
|
These guidelines will help you design the UI of your Metro style app so that it adapts successfully to any view state. |
Build date: 5/22/2012
