Office 2013 ribbon theme

Hi Rory,

Yes that is something we are looking into.

Hello, we added a Metro Light theme in the 2012.2 version.

Do we have a screenshot?

I'm really happy and impressed by metro light. I do however wonder if you will be modifying the backstage window to look and behave like the new backstage in Office 365. Such as the round arrow button returning you to a different set of menu options and making a menu full screen not showing the ribbon button header File etc. If you know of a sneaky work around Im all ears. Such as clicking on the File Button first triggering a fullscreen window that I can layout to appear as the 365 full page menu.

I have attached a couple of photos of what i am talking about.

Notice the Arrow inside the circle at the top of menu two.

Hi Adam,

Sorry no way to do the full screen or larger button yet, but it is something we are considering adding for the future.  I'll write down this post with the request so we can let you know if we add it.

Hi Adam,

We added the fully screen backstage with arrow button to the latest version, when a Metro theme is active.

Is there also a feature to do what Adam showed in his first screenshot?  That is, display a custom backstage-like fullscreen menu that is only used when you first open the application.  Kind of like a quick start page.

Hi Scott,

Sorry but nothing is built-in for that as of yet.

We're also quite interested in the "backstage splash" or "cold open screen" or whatever it might be called. We're currently dumping users into the backstage "open" screen on cold open, but that doesn't quite match all the usage scenarios we have. I can see the motivation for this initial launch screen.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.  How ideally would you like this additional open screen to work?  It is a different size from the normal backstage in terms of the left gutter width.  And I'm not sure of what object model you'd want in the API.

For us, setting some kind of dependency property would be enough. We'd only use it on a cold startup, where the user accesses the app from its icon, instead of from a recent document or shell verb. This appears to be how Office apps use this screen, as well. We'd probably check how the app was starting and the backing view model would set a property which we'd bind to this DP on the UI.

Same as Rory on the usage scenario.

I'm probably going to implement this in our app for now, as it's an important part of our "first 15 minutes with the app" story.  I'll update this thread with any important design considerations I discover through the implementation, but here's what I have in mind for how you would implement it:

1. Ribbon Window (or maybe Backstage) node would accept a new child node of type BackstageSplash.
2. BackstageSplash would probably have a few DPs that control default presentation scenarios, but the core one is to show itself on startup and close itself on button click.
3. BackstageSplash would expose two parts for templating: LeftPanel and RightPanel.
4. Most people would put a header and the recent documents list in left panel, but this obviously would be up to them.
5. Most people would put a WrapPanel or something similar to what Excel and Word use in the Right Panel.
6. It would be useful if you also had a premade sample where a button in BackstageSplash switched you over to the regular Backstage (like Excel and Word have).

Any further customization would happen by overriding the whole template for BackstageSplash, but the core things you'd be doing for us would be:

1. Handling the screen sizing, user interaction, and default theming
2. Allowing us to define the visuals in context of the existing Backstage/Ribbon nodes without having to go down AP and Behaviors route for simple sceanrios.

Right, as to content model, I was imagining the entire thing would just be a ContentControl where I could provide the template and draw it how I need in an app specific way. If the Headered Left/Headered Right template were to be adopted in the control itself, at least let me replace the entire ControlTemplate so I can manage the layout as needed (meaning even removing the split if needed).