Introduction
Lots of mobile applications use LoadingWheel
/ProgressBar
/ProgressRing
to tell users that it is doing some heavy processing or downloading data. Windows Phone SDK 7 and 8 provide a ready mechanism to do that through the SystemTray
object.
Exploring SystemTray Properties
SystemTray
can show a ProgressIindicator
on top of the Windows Phone screen. In addition, SystemTray
can show a text below the ProgressIindicator
to give user more details about what is happening. That could be done by adding the following code where you are downloading data.
var progressIndicator = new ProgressIndicator
{
IsVisible = true,
IsIndeterminate = true,
Text = "Downloading data..."
};
SystemTray.SetProgressIndicator(this, progressIndicator);
Other properties like BackgroundColor
, ForegroundColor
and Opacity
could be changed, as shown in the following image:
A good sample that uses the SystemTray
well is the LinkedIn for Windows Phone, note in the following screenshot the ProgressIndicator
and the text and time in different colors: