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Metro is Retro

When I first learned about the “Metro” design theme, it made me laugh. I thought man, we’re going full circle back to the days of simple, monochromatic designs, aren’t we? I’m not too young to remember applications that looked like these (many still do): Then we modernized our apps with rounded corners and colorful gradients everywhere. And now the simple, monochromatic,blocky designs of yesteryear are coming back! Not only on smartphones (where I think it makes most sense) but in full, powerful desktop applications too. At least now when you watch a "futuristic" sci-fi flick from the '80s, the once outdated computer screens don’t look so outdated anymore. They might have actually predicted the future accurately. We’ll see. Ok, except for the CRT monitors -is there a chance they’ll come back? In the latest release of Studio for Silverlight, we added the Cosmopolitan theme. This theme has features that resemble the Zune and Windows Phone design language (and the Microsoft Silverlight toolkit theme of the same name). Cosmopolitan can also be referred to as Metro. This theme gives you an elegant white and blue color scheme for a truly professional and modern-looking application (as of the time of this post anyway). Check out a live demo of the Cosmopolitan theme in Studio for Silverlight: http://demo.componentone.com/Silverlight/ControlExplorer/#Themes/Cosmopolitan It’s really easy to add a theme in Silverlight. You just drop the Theme from the toolbox onto the page. The C1Cosmopolitan theme will even apply to the standard Microsoft Controls to keep things simple.


<c1:C1ThemeCosmopolitan>  
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" />  
</c1:C1ThemeCosmopolitan>  

Performance (by both processor and user) is always key in business applications so you can’t go wrong with a less busy looking design.

ComponentOne Product Manager Greg Lutz

Greg Lutz

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