BruTile @ the Surface

Once we got the basics running I tried to edit the XAML to make it look better. This turned out to be harder than expected. The surface has once again its own default designs, which in my opinion are worse than the WPF standard designs. The default look is grey and square. So I wanted to change it to something more akin to our other touchtable applications: white and round. However Paul used a ScatterView component to display the layerlist and the geodan logo. He had read that one can just drop components in a ScatterView, without the need to embed them in ScatterViewItems. This is true, but it is a nightmare for the (non-initiated) designer. What happens is that the grey-square design of the ScatterViewItem is drawn beneath any layout you come up with for your own item. This is a very puzzling behaviour, although not entirely unexpected once you know that the ScatterViewItem exists.

Once I solved this issue I could seriously try to change the layout of the ScatterViewItems. Here however real glitches appeared. We use rounded borders and dropshadows for our items. As you can see below there are (at least) two issues:

Rounded border on the Surface don't work

The dark rectangle in the top of the image is actually a shadow of  a ScatterViewItem which for some reason doesn’t start below it. However this makes it easy to see the first glitch in the rendering. As you can see there is a thin dark line near the edge, which makes a weird square corner at the corner. This shouldn’t be there and when you resize the ScatterViewItem down, the shadow becomes darker (as it should have been in the first place) and the line is not visible anymore. If you don’t use rounded corners on the shadow the line is still there, but harder to notice because it is exactly following the edge of the shadow.

The second annoying glitch I’ve found is the gap between the border and the content. If we zoom in a bit on the layercontrol you can see there is a pixel space between the border and the content:

A gap between border and content

So far I haven’t been able to eliminate the pixel wide gap. It doesn’t look bad in our application right now, but in general it is bad that there is such an uncontrollable gap. So I have the feeling that the Surface people are not a big fan of borders in general and rounded border specifically.

If you look careful you can still make out the spot on her back where she was shaved. I’m wondering what will be fixed earlier: her hair or her back. Right now she still can’t jump but other then that she’s fine. She’s going to leave me this weekend because I’m off for a 5 week holiday. I hope to find her jumping about when I’m back

Alas! I searched the courtyard two times that night and once the next morning but no sign of her. On Monday evening I planned a search and rescue mission together with the owner of the cat. While I was delayed she discovered Bastet outside the building hiding under the bushes. When we brought her up and let her loose again in my house she limped heavily and did not want to eat. So we brought her to the Vet the next morning and apparently she tried to fly and failed. Our guess is that she jumped out of the kitchen window at 20m above ground.

She has spliced her palate and broke her hip in a way that separated her hip from her spine. But according to the vet these are common injuries for non-flying cats and she should recover fine, although they’re going to operate here hip/spine problem. I just got word that she started eating again so the palate injury is healing very quickly. Tomorrow she’ll be operated and I hope to see her tomorrow evening.

Here a nice portait of her in full ‘action’:

On a different note; I’ve started to take photo’s again. My camera had been occupied for various longer and shorter timelapse and stop motion movies. But the beautiful weather made me go out and take black and white pictures of my city.