Introduction to the Panorama Control

The Panorama is a wide horizontal canvas that spans over screen boundaries. The canvas is partitioned into several sections. The Panorama is designed to be a starting place and is normally used as the top layer to other pages. Ordinarily, page content is designed to fit within the confines of the phone display; the Panorama, however, offers a unique way to view controls and data by using the long horizontal canvas that extends beyond the confines of the display. Layered animations are used to smoothly pan content at different speeds, providing a parallax effect.

Like the Pivot, the Panorama also uses a secondary control called a PanoramaItem, which serves as a container that hosts other content and controls, such as grids, lists, and buttons.

As the Panorama is intended to coax the user to explore, it should show content that is interesting and specific to the user. The user should also not be overloaded with too much content; think white space and not loads of data. The Panorama should be thought of as a starting place, containing data and links that take the user to more detailed pages of content, pages that may include a Pivot for example. The user is then able to leave the exploratory style of the Panorama for the more focused style of the Pivot.

Unlike the Pivot, the Panorama is designed to be explorative; it is not about completing a task and should not show an application bar.

A page with a Panorama should offer a visually appealing experience. This can be achieved with an attractive background. A Panorama background can be either a single color or a background image. The image size should be 800 pixels high and 480 to 1000 pixels wide, depending on the number of sections to be displayed. It is possible to use an image with a width exceeding 1000 pixels, but more than 2000 pixels and the image will be clipped.