Difference between Panorama and Pivot Control

Question

What is the difference between the winphone 7 Panorama and Pivot Controls? To me they seem very similar, apart from the slightly different visual appearance. In which situations should one or the other be used?

Answer 1

There is a video on Channel 9 with Amy Alberts and Chad Roberts that talks about the differences between the Panorama and Pivot controls and when you should use each.

In my opinion, the Panorama control is for when you need to create a "hub"-type application (like the Games hub) that acts primarily as a jumping point and offers summary information for the rest of the application. The Pivot is used in much the same way that you would use a tab control on other platforms.

Answer 2

As said above, the Panorama control is really meant for rich Hub type look .. smooth multi-screen scrolling with Parallax effect, ideally including images in the views. The Pivot control is more for presenting slices of the related data to the user or categorizing the content .. the in-built emails & calendar are examples. Both controls are very suited for dynamic data-binding.

Jeff Blankenburg, one of the MSFT evangelists wrote two nice posts explaining their use: http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/post/31-Days-of-Windows-Phone-7.aspx

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

I would use the Panorama control if the content of your application lends itself to being presented in a format where you think of the screen as being a window into a larger page...one that can loop back around to the beginning. Also, consider whether that content needs to support gestures, especially swipes, because those will cause conflicts between some action intended to take place in a control, for example a map with panning, and the "outer" Panorama control's behavior of scrolling.

I'm also reconsidering using the Pivot control. It has a more distinct division between sections of content than Panorama does and I like both the gesture swiping to switch between pivots and the animation. However, it has caused some tombstoning problems and with the advent of copy-and-paste there could be a conflict between the user trying to select content to copy and the triggering of the swipe gesture to switch pivots. Disabling the Pivot Control swipe gesture talks about a possible work-around, although I haven't tried it and see from the comments below that article that there may be some other issues.