Full screen mode

[David]

Anywhere, I am wondering if it is possible to make the menu appear in full screen mode, without returning in normal mode, with the two lines on top and below.

I think that I have to switch out of full screen mode to show the menu, but I can switch back into full screen mode automatically after you make your menu selection.  I'll work on this for the next release.

Then, would it be possible to center the background image on screen in the non full screen mode?

Yes.  This will be in the next release.

Finally, when I finish a game into the full screen mode, the congratulation box doesn't want to desappear when I push 'ok'. However, it does in the normal mode.

I'll fix this in the next release.  For now, you can press the "Back" button to get back to the game.

[Neverwish]

That IS an effective work! Thanks a lot.

[PBelamant]

Hi there,

Just a simple request as to how you guys actually enforce full screen mode, especially with Phone models such as HTC?

Sorry if this request may seem inappropriate, just very interrrested to know?

[David]

Hi PBelamant,

Great question.  This took me weeks to perfect, as the Windows Mobile API's block practically every attempt to make a full screen application with standard menus.  That's why you'll see most full-screen apps just give up and write their own menu interface, which never works quite like you expect.

Even Microsoft can't get full-screen mode right (see their Pocket Internet Explorer, which makes you press the menu button twice to get the menu--once to exit full screen mode and once again to actually bring up the menu).  It's even more complicated by the fact that the PocketPC and SmartPhone have completely different implementations for the title bar, and the PocketPC 2003 implementation seems particularly buggy.

The solution is too complex to put into a post, but it involves hiding the menu and title bars via native API calls and writing my own form manager to handle displaying dialogs (where you temporarily want the title and menu bar) and switching to other apps (on the PocketPC, you need to re-display the title bar in that case because it's shared by all apps).  My solution still has problems showing dialogs that are children of other dialogs, so I simply avoid that case.

In fact, I will probably write custom code to display dialogs for version 2 so I can avoid these complications.  Right now the dialogs are too slow to appear for my liking, and they aren't full-screen on the PocketPC.

Sorry for this vague answer.  I wish there was a simple solution, but as far as I know, there isn't.

-David

[Philip]

Hey David,

Thanx for the reply... Seems time consuming, but maybe worth it?

I'm more interested in how you actually go about hiding the menu bars? And if these bars are hidden, is it possible to then print any image over it, as you guys do with the white background in the sudoku game?

The reason i ask is primarily because i don't feel like resizing one of my apps imaging for a phone (HTC MTeor) that was meant to be 320x240!

Regards,

Phil.

[David]

Hi Philip,

If you want to use the full screen without the standard menus, that's actually not too difficult.

If you're using the .NET Compact Framework, there's an MSDN article that describes how to do it at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497276.aspx.  See the topic "How do I create a full screen form?" in the article.

Then, yes, you can use the full display.

If you're using native code, you can use SHFullScreen.  See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa930139.aspx.

-David