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While at my current employer (REPL ltd) we had a contract with M&S to produce a touch screen interactive display to be put up in their women's shoes department.

This was produced as a Windows Forms application. Part of the design required for a cover flow system, like what you would see on your smart phone when browsing albums maybe, where each element in the control can be a custom view. The design in question had images, text and videos in various custom layouts.

Later on we had to produce another application, this time for Argos for a Kids Wishlist application. This was an iOS and Android application and we produced this in Unity3D. Again, a similar Cover Flow system was desired to allow unique UI elements to be displayed. Further to this, other layout algorithms might be needed too.

This project is a somewhat recreation of that, but with the benefit of hindsight to a degree of what challenges came along. The cover flow alogrithm is very similar to that which I sued in the M&S shoe demo, but the code design is very different as this is designed in a much more extendable way...with the ability to add new layouts.

The aims for this project,

• Simple to setup and use
• Extendability, we don't want to be limited to the layouts included
• Cell reuse where possible
• Good memory usage, if we have 100 items in our list but only ever 3 or 4 on screen, we don't want to generate 100 cells! We want too, as best as possible, only generate enough cells for what will be on screen at once.
• Smooth animations.
• Some simple examples of layouts including the classic Cover Flow