2 years ago, Microsoft and Nokia announced that the Symbian OS will get Silverlight support. 2 days ago, Microsoft made the Silverlight for Symbian beta with developer tools live but was made unavailable later. It is expected that now the beta will get released in the Mix Web Conference.
I am greatly inspired by Windows 7 taskbar and was thinking if someone could make same look-alike navigation for a blog then it will be so cool. Fellow at Nikola blog has made this cool Windows 7 like taskbar button navigation control for a website in Silverlight that looks so cool(to me at least).
The source code is also available for download so if you want to put it in action in you blog’s navigation bar then it’s few steps away if you are good enough with Silverlight.
Windows 7 taskbar is specifically designed for ease of access for touch screen systems that will be common in future. The box containing each icon adapts the mouse over highlight color by judging the matching tone of icon’s dominating colors. This task bar look-alike isn’t intelligent enough to do the same automatically but there is guide to how to choose the right highlight color.
Check out the demo here
Download the source code here
Just found this great and so complete list of Silverlight controls enlisted by Tim Heuer at his blog.
He says
:
I figured it would be a good idea to do a larger dump of those that I’m aware of (and hope you add comments to point me to others so I can amend this list) and help make you aware of them as well. There are a ton of great resources out there for Silverlight developers and I’m always impressed how our developer partners are extending our platforms to make tools for developers (and most of the time better than we do :-)).
Here’s his round-up of controls (alphabetically – links here will jump to their section):
Stirius is the codename for the latest project demonstrating the next level of Web user interface.... Silverlight 🙂
Title: How to Declare a Custom User Control from a XAML Page.
Demo:https://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/66033/Custom%20UserControl/iframe.html
Title: Creating Smooth Tile Transitions using Opacity Masks.
Demo: https://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/66033/Terrain%20Transititions/iframe.html
This tutorial will look into using the Opacity property on the tiles to create smooth, natural looking transitions between tiles. For example, blending a dirt tile into a grass tile, a grass tile into a rock tile, etc.
Below, on the left, is a screen shot of a grass and dirt tile without the use of an opacity mask. As you can see, the straight line does not make for a very real looking transition! On the right is the result with an opacity mask applied, making for a much more realistic transition.
No Opacity Mask With Opacity Mask
So how does this work? What we do is we put down a grass layer followed by a layer of dirt on the same tile location. We then apply an Opacity mask to the dirt image which tells Silverlight what level of rendering to do on each pixel within the dirt image.
