Increasing Splash Screen Size for Windows 8 Metro app

Question

In my new app i'm creating(With vb.net and Xaml) i have gathered graphics for the appmanifest file with the required sizes. The splash screen's required size is 620 x 300 pixels, so I created the file with those specifications and the splash screen was far to small to fill the screen. Is there something that I should change within the xaml file to enlarge the splash screen? Or is it something else?

Answer 1

The splash screen only shows up in the center of the screen. You need to set the Background color to the color of the background of the splash screen so it seems like the image fills the screen. I can only guess that the thinking is that the splash screen image needs to be small so it doesn't slow app start time.

Answer 2

The splash screen size is by design to be 620x300 at 100% scale factor. Its purpose, along with the background color in the manifest, is to guarantee that something appears when an app is launched (for 3/4 of a second minimum), even if the first thing the app does is crash. This is a piece of system-provided UI that cannot be customized.

That said, there is a technique called an "extended splash screen" for this purpose. It means making your app's first UI page look exactly like the splash screen, initially, and then morphing it into whatever UI you want. Many apps do this to customize the splash screen experience. For more information, refer to "How to extend the splash screen" in the docs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh868191.aspx).

Technically speaking, there's no requirement that your extended splash screen initially match the system-provided one, but it makes the transition smoother. In the end, it's your call.

It's also worth nothing that even having the need to do an extended splash screen in the first place is considered by some as a poor user experience. Ideally, an app gets to interactivity very quickly and doesn't keep the user staring at any splash screen for very long (e.g. while the app is waiting for some web requests to come back). Of course, this just isn't possible or practical with some apps, hence the extended splash screen approach.