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

Two maps on the same page - Side-by-side

    How good I am feeling to post a code example after such a long time! It's been all "news" over the past so many posts! Well now that I am finally doing a code example, I am posting a very highly requested code sample. Placing two Google Maps on the same page (Now that's simple you would say!), but side by side. Now this is the thing that most people struggle with. Well, implementing the second part is also very simple, as you will see in today's code.     Let's see the code. Here it is!     The output of the above code will be as seen in the result section above.     As most of you will realize, there are two maps, one centered at "Pune" and other at "Noida". Why I chose these two locations? Well, just like that!...The main issue of concern is how the maps appeared side-by-side and not one below the other as would be normal behavior of two "div" elements used in the same page. Now here is the trick! Check out the...
10 comments
Read more

Retriving co-ordinates...

         We have seen 2 Google Maps API v3 examples wherein we have retrieved the latitude-longitude co-ordinates of the point of click on the map. In the first example we have displayed the co-ordinates in the information window and in the second , we have displayed the co-ordinates in a form in the information window.         Today we will create a code to retrieve the latitude longitude co-ordinates in a text box while simultaneously a marker appears on the map as well. So, here goes the code. <html> <head> <title> Google Maps API v3 - Adding marker on Click and retrieving the co-ordinates in a text box </title> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var map;    //When using event as a parameter to a function declare map, strictly as a global variable fun...
5 comments
Read more

Form info window

         Today we will look at a Google Maps API v3 example to add a form in the information bubble! This is usually required when we wish to accept some data/information from the user! This data can be saved to a server in the form of an XML file or a database! The information can then be retrieved back at a later stage, when necessary!          In this example we will only look at form in the information bubble! The connectivity part with the server will be discussed in another post! So, today's code snippet is as seen below! <html> <head> <title> Google Maps API v3 - Adding marker and info window on Click and creating a form in the infowindow with the lat-lng information in it. </title> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var map;    //When using ev...
5 comments
Read more

Geodesic Polyline

    Today we will have a look at a very interesting polyline example - "The geodesic polyline". Now the first question that will pop is "What is geodesic?". Mathematically, geodesic means the shortest line between two points on a mathematically defined surface, as a straight line on a plain or an arc of a great circle or sphere.     The next question after reading the above definition is clearly, "Why do we need geodesic polylines?" and that would be followed up with "What is this Great Circle?". We will discuss this first, before we move on to the actual example today. The example is very very similar to the normal polyline example, with just a small change.     Having said so, I will now try to explain why we need a geodesic polyline? The shortest distance between two locations on the earth is rarely a straight line as the earth is roughly spherical in nature. So any two points on the earth, even if they are very close lie on a curve a...
5 comments
Read more

Playing with the markers and info window bubbles...

    In the last few posts, we have seen some marker examples and some information window examples. Now, lets do something interesting combining these two things. Just writing that "This is an info window" in the information bubble is not very interesting! And I know this...Have gone through the same phase!     So, today we will do something interesting! We will display the latitude- longitude co-ordinates of the point that the user clicks on the map! Doing this is not at all complex! Copy paste the following code and you will see for yourself a map coming to life!     The output of the above code looks as seen in the result section above! If you have any queries regarding the above code please comment on the blog post or feel free to contact me at my mail ID .
3 comments
Read more