Surface Duo Blog

Microsoft Surface Duo developer year in review

Hakon Strande December 29, 2020 Dec 29, 2020 12/29/20

Hello dual-screen developers, It was over a year ago – 2nd October 2019 – that Panos introduced the Surface Duo to the world. In the months since, we have shared a number of milestones with you leading up to the product launch (and beyond): We’re incredibly excited to see the Surface Duo released, and thankful for the ...

Hacky Holidays!

Guy Merin December 22, 2020 Dec 22, 2020 12/22/20

Hello developers, For many people around the world, this time of year is for celebration of holidays and enjoying long-standing traditions. Some folks use the time for hacking - to learn new skills or catch up on the latest technologies, and since 2020 marked the release of the Microsoft Surface Duo, we’d like to take this ...

Build dual-screen Cordova apps for Microsoft Surface Duo

Craig Dunn December 17, 2020 Dec 17, 2020 12/17/20

Hello hybrid app developers, This week I’m happy to share an example plugin for use with Cordova that will help to enhance your hybrid apps for dual-screens. The plugin includes DisplayMask.jar to detect the Surface Duo and return information about the masked hinge area when the app is spanned, and exposes it in JavaScript for ...

Dual-screen library update with Jetpack Window Manager

Andrei Cirja December 10, 2020 Dec 10, 2020 12/10/20

Hello Kotlin and Java developers, We’re excited to announce version 1.0.0-beta1 of our dual-screen libraries for Microsoft Surface Duo, which integrates Google’s Jetpack Window Manager support. We’ve made the underlying device interface swappable, so you can continue to use the existing Display Mask API as long as you wish and...

Microsoft Surface Duo One Dev Question video series

Guy Merin December 3, 2020 Dec 3, 2020 12/3/20

Hello Android developers, Twice this year we’ve released a series of short videos answering questions about Microsoft Surface Duo development. In case you missed them, check out these videos and meet the Surface Duo Developer Experience team! Here are the most popular questions and answers we received: How do you get ...

Build a dual-screen custom layout with Jetpack Window Manager

Craig Dunn November 24, 2020 Nov 24, 2020 11/24/20

Hello Android developers, The Microsoft Surface Duo SDK offers a variety of custom controls to help enhance your dual-screen apps, from layouts, tabs, and navigation controls for Kotlin and Java developers to the TwoPaneView for Xamarin, React Native, and Uno Platform developers. However, you might have an application-specific ...

Fluent UI for Microsoft Surface Duo

Aneesha Kommineni November 19, 2020 Nov 19, 2020 11/19/20

Hello Kotlin and Java developers, I’m pleased to present our first release of Fluent UI Android controls for Surface Duo. Fluent UI is a user experience framework to help you build attractive apps that are consistent across Android and other platforms. Read more about Fluent UI. To help developers build dual-screen apps we ...

Bringing Sketch 360 to Microsoft Surface Duo

Michael Scherotter November 12, 2020 Nov 12, 2020 11/12/20

My inspiration Back in 2018, I came up with a way of using a Microsoft Surface to create 360 panoramic sketches and the Microsoft Garage encouraged me to release it as an app, Sketch 360. I created Sketch 360 because I wanted to develop a tool to help me create these immersive sketches more quickly. Because they are sketches from a ...

Dual-screen list-detail with navigation

Cesar Valiente November 5, 2020 Nov 5, 2020 11/5/20

Hello Kotlin and Java developers! When you’re enhancing your existing Android apps for the Microsoft Surface Duo, you may want to keep your existing single-screen behavior. In today’s blog, I’ll share an example list-detail that supports the traditional back-button behavior in a single screen, but shows the list and detail ...

Working with the camera on Microsoft Surface Duo

Meir Ben Itay October 29, 2020 Oct 29, 2020 10/29/20

Hi Android developers! While the Surface Duo runs Android apps just like any other Android device, there are some differences in the hardware: In this post, we will review some dual-screen-specific camera behaviors and present some different options for enhancing camera capture in your apps to work even better on ...