Skip to main content

Material UI, Google Polymer & Web Components

    Google introduced Material UI during the Google I/O a few days back. Since then the web is all abuzz with articles about material UI and what Polymer is and how these 2 fit together. In this article today, I will try and helps us all to get a better understanding of these new concepts.


    So, let's start with Material UI first. Google has for long been trying to bridge the gap between the Web and the Android worlds with a unified user interface and Google's Material UI is a big step towards this. The new design philosophy is about dynamically adjusting the elements according to screen size, add more white space between elements, provide a lot of user feedback using animations, make use of bold UI colors and be flat and 3D about the design at the same time. Now that sounds really cool, isn't it? Well, actually it is and you will actually appreciate and enjoy it all the more when you watch the following video from this year's Google I/O.


    Now let's shift our focus to Google Polymer. Google Polymer is not new and has been around for about more than a year now. Though it is still available as a developer-preview sort of a thing, it is being used to create applications. Polymer is a pioneering library that makes it faster and easier than ever before to build beautiful applications on the web. Polymer is built on top of a set of powerful new web platform primitives called the Web Components. Web Components has been around for quite some time now, after it had been conceptualized in 2010. This is a great article that you should definitely read to understand what web components are.

  
    Now, we have looked into Material UI, Google Polymer and Web Components. How does this all fit together? Polymer is the embodiment of material design for the web. The Polymer team works closely with the design teams behind material design. In fact, Polymer has played a key role in material design's development. It was used to quickly prototype and iterate on design concepts. Watch this next video where Eric Bidelman speaks about how web components are a complete game changer and how this revolution will make developers more productive and reduce the cognitive load of being a Web Developer.


    Till this point, we now have a clear understanding of the Material UI, Google Polymer and Web Components. Now let's get a brief overview of what components does Polymer offer the web developers. Watch this next video again from Google I/O 2014 by Rob Dodson.


    Hope you are all excited by now to try your hands at Google Polymer and embark on a new design jouney with Google's Material UI. I will soon be sharing sample codes on how to use the various components of Google Polymer - that means there is more fun on the way! Stay tuned!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments here...

Recommended for You

Google Map's Real-Time Traffic Layer...

    You can now check the traffic condition on the road before you leave for work, or a party or to your friend's place. Google's Traffic layer shows the traffic conditions in your area - LIVE!!! Live traffic data is available in major cities in the United States, France, Britain, Canada and Australia, with new cities and countries frequently added. The Google Maps API allows you to add real-time traffic information (where supported) to your maps using the TrafficLayer object. Traffic information is provided for the time at which the request is made. Consult this spreadsheet to determine traffic coverage support.     Let us now have a look at the Google Maps API - Trafiic Layer example. Copy the following code in a simple text file and save it as html. Click on this html file and it will open in your default browser. You will then see the traffic conditions in your area - LIVE...     The output of the above code looks as seen in the r...
4 comments
Read more

Four maps on the same page - Playing with events

    In today's example we will see how to add 4 maps on the same web page and then play a bit around with some events in Google Maps API. Lets have a look at the code. All that you have to do to get the code working is copy the code in a text file and save it with .html extension. Open this html file in your browser and you will see the four maps in action!     Adding the four maps on a webpage should not be a challenge anymore, and all the more after the example Two Google Maps - Side by side that I shared a few weeks back! All you need to pay attention is to the events. There are two events "drag" and "zoom_changed". As the event names suggest, when you will drag or zoom the first map (upper left map), the remaining three maps will also zoom and pan accordingly! Try it out and leave a comment of what you think of it! You can also drop your queries or doubts about the same here!     The output of the above code appears as seen in th...
4 comments
Read more

Where does Google have live traffic information?

Where does Google have live traffic information.md Where all can I see the real-time traffic data? This question has been asked a several hundred times by several hundred people on several hundred forums. Probably you too have had this question. Well, we now have an answer to it and a very good one. Click on the image below and you would be redirected to a map from Google which will show you all the places at which live traffic data is available. Hope you’ll enjoy this and quench your thirst to know more about the Google Real Time traffic data. Update 10/31/2017 Previously the availability of traffic would be shown as seen in the image below, but now you need to be at a minimum of zoom level 5 and centered on the location of your choice to see where traffic data would be avialble. If haven’t already read from where Google gets it’s traffic data, be sure to check out this earlier post. Do post any question you have about the Google Maps, and I will try and answer as many as I can. Fo...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bicycling Layer...

    Recreational cyclists and bike commuters alike can plot cycle-friendly routes, find trails, and avoid snarling traffic with Google Map's Bicycle layer. Map's bike-friendly, green-toned map layer is very eye-pleasing. The Google Maps API allows you to add bicycle information to your maps using the BicyclingLayer object.     The BicyclingLayer renders a layer of bike paths, suggested bike routes and other overlays specific to bicycling usage on top of the given map. Additionally, the layer alters the style of the base map itself to emphasize streets supporting bicycle routes and de-emphasize streets inappropriate for bicycles.     Let us have a look at the following example. The code has a map which is centered at Pune, India. There are very few cycle tracks in Pune and so you will see just a few dark green lines on the map. But if you would change the latitude-longitude values in the code and center the map at USA, then you will see a...
Post a Comment
Read more