Smooth splash screen transition for Windows Phone panorama apps

I was trying to finally get into some coding today and decided to create a simple stopwatch application for Windows Phone using the panorama control. However, as I’m much more comfortable with Photoshop, I immediately set out to create a good-looking splash screen for the app. I wanted an effect similar to what Apple recommends for iOS apps, which is using a mockup of the actual user interface as the splash screen to provide a seamless app-launching experience. Here’s the result:

Obviously, the app is very barebones at this point, but I’ll hopefully make some progress in the next few days.

Anyway, to achieve this effect, take a screenshot of the last (right-most) panorama screen and shift it 50px 48px to the right (for example using the excellent Paint.NET, if you don’t have Photoshop). If you have a background image, you’ll also need to copy part of it into the splash screen to fill out the newly-empty pixels; if you have a solid background, just fill them with the appropriate color. Now, save this image and set it as the splash screen image. Done!

If you’ve got any questions regarding this trick, feel free to leave a comment. I will try to help where I can.