I am sure many of you have heard and even interacted with the CoverFlow view of iTunes. In the WPF world we have the good folks from Thirteen23, who have created an app called Harmony that shows off the use of CoverFlow. They make good use of the Viewport3D to pull the desired effect.
Recently I had the opportunity to develop a custom control similar to CoverFlow. I call this control the ElementFlow, because besides CoverFlow, the control can do lots of other views. In fact the whole view part of the control has been abstracted out so you can plug in your own view (if you wish). This is possible by creating a new ViewState and providing the necessary animations to flow the items.
Since the control is supposed to layout a list of items, it behaves very similar to an ItemsControl. However for various reasons I have not derived from ItemsControl (Why? - that’s a topic of a different blog post).
To demonstrate this control I have captured two videos, one which contains reflections and one without. In the first one I show only the CoverFlow control (with reflections ON). In the second video (reflections OFF) I start with the CoverFlow view and then switch my ViewStates. You can see that the view transition is very fluid and the selected-item is retained on different ViewStates. [Notethat not all layout-related dependency properties have mappings for different ViewStates.]
(Shows the Coverflow view with Reflections)
(Shows other ViewStates)
Some of the inner workings
What are the features of this control?
Future updates