By default, a ScatterViewItem can be scaled as large as the display. If the content is an image, the image will scale up with it. This works well, but if the application has multiple users at the same time, one person could scale an image up and occlude everything the other user was working with.

A solution to that would be to limit the size of the ScatterViewItem, but allow the content within it to be manipulated separately from the container. Something like the video below.

Here is a Visual Studio 2010 project which includes the source for the application shown above. Let’s discuss it over on the Surface forum.

If you’re building a Surface or Surface Toolkit application, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re using ScatterView. ScatterView is an ItemsControl, so it’s a great way to show information about a list of objects and allow multiple users to manipulate the objects independently. However you’re usually only showing a small amount of information about the object within a ScatterViewItem — an image thumbnail, or a song title, for example. What would be nice is if you could flip the item over to show more detail.

I’ve needed to do this more than once, and I’m not the only one. The first time was in our Kodak Surface application, and I achieved the affect with some horribly hacky and fake animations. The project I’m currently working on also has a requirement to flip items over, so I decided I’d do it right this time. That’s the real reason I put Plane together. Check it out.

Here is a Visual Studio 2010 project which includes the Plane source as well as examples of flipping ScatterViewItems in Surface and Surface Toolkit projects. You will need the Surface SDK and/or the Surface Toolkit installed to run these samples.