When I was involved in starting up a mobile cross-platform project a few months ago, one of the goals was to make the experience between the platform as similar as possible. Not surprisingly, the platform that set the standard was iPhone, and the other platforms had to do as best they could to measure up. My main responsibility was the WinPhone platform, and it didn't take much analyzing to realize that old friends like the ListView and the Grid were out of the question. So I went out to look for what others were doing.

I started by looking at Alex Yakhnin's UI Framework, and was (as usual) impressed with the things that Alex can do with the standard controls. Just take a look at the ListBox on the right.

It was when I started to play around with it, and added a few more items in the list, that I was instantly put off when the classical scrollbars appeared in the otherwise nice control.

Even if there are many things to pick from the framework, like how to draw alpha-blended bitmaps in various ways, I wanted something that was not built on the native controls.

So I moved on to the MobileForms Toolkit from Resco, and even if I like what they are doing with many very nice controls, I wanted to have full control of the layout which ultimately require that you have the source code.

The same goes for Touch Controls Suite from miraByte which has some nice controls for scrollable lists with navigation. They are still working on the designer support, but is a nice alternative if you want to get going fast.

The thing I found that came closest to what I was looking for was the Fluid Controls by Thomas Gerber. The sample application was successfully designed to look very similar to the iPhone. It had many of the nice features, like the scrolling lists, animations, etc, but still there was two things that I was missing. First, I wanted something that conformed more with the design guidelines of WinPhone, like the use of the soft buttons (menus), form headings, etc. Second, the implementation was quite extensive, and I was not interested in learning an extensive codebase in order to build a nice user interface.

In the next part of this series, I will show you how I start on what would eventually be the TouchUI.