SysTray + Panorama: mostly still a no-go in Mango

One of the most prevalent comments that I’ve gotten whenever we’ve built a WP7 application using a Panorama, is “What happened to the time thingie?”  For those who don’t know, the time thingie is called the System Tray as shown here:

As a developer, the last thing I want to do is take functionality away from users, but in this case, if you’re using a Panorama background image, you have to.  The reason I say you have to is that the System Tray won’t overlay over any of your controls, but rather it will take up the top small amount of space at the top of your page pushing everything else down.  So here’s the XAML and what it will look like using the sample panorama project installed by default when you install the Windows Phone Developer Tools:

shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"

Not exactly the most appealing look of all time now is it?

When first reading through the help files online for the beta of the Mango release, I noticed that you could now set both the background and foreground colors, problem solved right?

Well… not really. 

The first issue is that pops up is that the pattern on the background that the starter project uses has some designs that run off of the screen (not sure I like this fact since for the rest of the phone when something runs off screen it means you can scroll to it), since we can’t set a background image for the system tray, it looks kind of funny.

shell:SystemTray.BackgroundColor="#01499d"

That’s alright for me though, as I rarely use background image that has funky circles in it anyways.  However, scrolling over one panorama item shows the next issue: tall letters in your panorama title:

That’s right, it’s not just the design that gets clipped by the new System Tray, but also taller letters also have this problem as well.

So if the new System Tray has all these issues with design, what good is it then?  For some of the applications we’ve built, we use a panorama that uses the logo of the company for the panorama title. 

In that small use case, then we can finally get what our users are asking for.  So as the title says:

SysTray + Panorama: mostly still a no-go in Mango