What is Reddit's opinion of Polymer?

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Not an app, but probably the closest thing. Elements and Calculator

Polymer != Web Components

HTML imports (web components) will be a thing, but they are by no means ready.

Polymer may make it as a Twitter Bootstrap replacement. Web apps made by people who don’t care about design and good practices will look and behave less terrible. Once again, half of the internet may look just the same (blue buttons everywhere). Anything is better than hard-coded color pink.

To expand on what /u/RotationSurgeon said, this is Polymer and, more specifically, Google's styled implementation of it; Paper.

> I'm not sure if it's the inexperience that the devs have building these tools (since they're the first of their kind of JavaScript) or if it's inherent in JavaScript.

That's a good question. I think the answer is probably more the latter than the former. There's inherent shittiness in javascript that makes writing libraries hard -- no linker, an ill conceived type system, an ill conceived object model, the DOM and it's API's.

I think Backbone is an example of inexperienced tool building, but libraries like Angular/Ember/Marionette/others and conceptual stuff like Polymer are pushing the envelope a lot more. Although there are reasons not to use any of them.

Maybe ES6 will help, but it'll be years before we know, and trends will have changed so much by then.

> They mention desktop a lot, right next to mobile/tablet. Do you think Google will come out with tools to make implementing Material Design on your web app easier?

Check out http://www.polymer-project.org/

From the demos (like this or this one) it looks like Polymer is way too much mobile-oriented. Those demos look weird to me on a desktop...

I am checking the polymer tutorial. Its seems WIP, has theres parts of the tutorial where you can get lost and have no idea where yo put the code. The index of the tutorial page is broken[1]. So Google guys, If you can't make Polymer work correctly in your tutorial page, how I, that I am much more stupid, can make it work?. Still interestedin this, but seems a bit rushed to the market.

[1] on linux chrome and linux firefox http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/start/usingelements.html

Looking good!

This is the perfect time for me to point out something about MD that's been bugging me for a while now:

Does anyone feel like Google made the checkboxes way too small for finger taps? MD checkboxes are pretty small, I think.

I think a larger version of these checkboxes (including that nice animation) would be a better choice for our fingers.

PS - For those developing to-do list apps: I think it'd be nice if you set it up so when a user taps the checkbox, the list item also ends up being stricken with a line through it (even better, make it optional in the settings, so it can be toggled on/off according to user preference) :)

In that case FireFox Nightly is broken. It works on my FF stable.

The polyfill supports a broad range of current and older browsers:

http://www.polymer-project.org/resources/compatibility.html

I would personally wait a bit more before using this in production. It will need some time for it to settle down and have the bugs knocked out of it.

If you want to play around with some of the UI elements, you can check out here.

The new Z-axis rendering rendering is pretty cool where you can specify the height of various UI elements and it will automatically render shadows in real-time. Apparently Google may port this to iOS for their own apps.

I'll admit I'm curious about Polymer, but the author does the project no good throwing in phrases like this:

> With Polymer.js, you can craft your own HTML elements and compose them into complete, complex applications that are scalable and maintainable.

Whether your application is "complete, complex" and/or is "scalable and maintainable" has nothing at all to do with Polymer. You can make applications that fit those paradigms without Polymer, and I'm pretty sure it's just as easy (if not easier) to create crappy applications with Polymer.

edit: evidently, that text was lifted verbatim from the Polymer website, so shame on the author for lazy and improper quoting/annotating. If you take a quote from another page, make it obvious it's a quote and don't inject it into your own copy as if you wrote it.

Thanks! I made it myself

It uses bootstrap and was based on this theme... but I added a bunch of stuff, like the video.

The submission page uses Google's Polymer.

This is what working on it looked like.

Yup, I was just arguing a point against using Polymer for one custom tag.

As /u/Snefl said you could just use <img data-x-gif/> instead of the custom tag, and I think that's the way to go here.

>Sure, so we agree then.

Well, I obviously don't agree that there is a problem.

>In what way does Polymer make Web Components easier to work with?

It takes care of the polyfills and it reduces the amount of boilerplate code for a bunch of convenient features:

http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/start/creatingelements.html (the list at the top)

>You could just as easily have defined your own component constructors/prototypes and pass to Polymer to handle nuances.

Yes, you can of course reinvent the wheel.

Polymer is cool, but it's too bad that it's a) pre-alpha and b) only supports the latest version of each browser. As such, it's not really a viable solution for IT systems. Guess I'll just stick with Angular.

Awesome. The FAQ and Browser Support pages is missing for some reason, though.

For those who are wondering, Polymer (as a whole) supports only the latest version of "evergreen" browsers, while individual pieces may have broader support. See the cached Browser Compatibility page for more info.

Wait. Am I missing something? AngularJS supports IE8+ and Polymer only supports IE10+. Or is the documentation wrong?

Also at play is Google's recent switch to material design layouts, which they implement using their Polymer library to take advantage of web components features, which are still in the draft stage and not implemented in every browser. As a result, there's some extra overhead Polymer has to perform to bring web components-like features to browsers that don't support them natively.

In ELI5 terms, Google Maps will probably load more slowly if you're not using Google Chrome due to workarounds for features not yet supported in your browser.

> The Paper elements are a set of UI elements that implement the material design system. (source)

If I've mistaken the elements used on the Google Now page for those in their Polymer Paper, then mea culpa.

Oooh, here's a Designer Tool: "Designer is a drag and drop tool for prototyping apps using Polymer. Save your experiments as Github gists." -> http://www.polymer-project.org/tools/designer/

And here are a couple of demos:http://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-calculator/demo.html and http://www.polymer-project.org/apps/topeka/

Hmm not sure where to find one, but I looked up some links for you that could be useful:

• http://www.google.com/design/spec/layout/layout-principles.html# (there's a Desktop Template towards the bottom)
• http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/elements/material.html

The reason I liked it was that all your HTML generation was in one place reducing code duplication.

To me communication via events feels very dangerous - kind of like just using global variables. Maybe there's a pattern that makes it safer/more maintainable but I'm not aware of it.

Polymer has a tag which is meant to prevent FOUC. Dunno if it works when adding a new element. http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/polymer/styling.html#fouc-prevention

Thanks though for your perspective. It's sort of where I'm starting to move. My feeling is that there is actually a model / controller framework which is waiting to be built to complement web components. So WCs as the view and then maybe an ActiveRecord style library for models and some kind of controller classes for the glue/binding of WCs and data.

Definitely adopt an Android L interface before it's out.

This guy here has some great ideas for it:

http://discuss.popcorntime.io/t/android-app-ui-final/1413/13

However, he's right the color scheme needs tweaking. He uses colors that are too similar to each other, and makes it look like it's all filled with the same color too much.

Maybe this can help:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

But look at Google's examples, too. Or check out other nice looking material design apps and of course Google's own examples.

Also, forget about Gingerbread support, if you were planning it. No need at this point, and it just makes things harder and buggier for you. 4+ or even 4.1+ should be fine for an app like this.

If people love the Android app look, you could even adopt it in the desktop version through Polymer (in version 5.0 or whatever). But check out for performance. I've been hearing it's not that great performance wise. But if it works well, it might be nice.

Two small things,

1. I highly suggest vulcanizing
2. When viewed on mobile, the images partway down the page are squished, mark a relitive width and let the browser set height on mobile?

Well, sure. Just like controls of the native <video> element. They too are laid out with CSS.

The point was that Web Components allow you to create your own tags, which can do a bit of layout. E.g. you can make something like tabs or a split pane.

Check the demo of the Paper Elements:

http://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-elements/demo.html

Press the button in the top right to view the source.

The innovations made from the mid to late aughts were strongly hardware driven: think good capacitive touchscreens, stronger glass and the UI changes that essentially had to go along. This is also why Apple took off so much. Despite my dislike for their platform, I have to admit their supply chain is working for them really well, and those benefits haven't stopped just yet.

Google is trying to innovate in the UI area with material design and Polymer, but attempts to improve UI without underlying hardware improvements is not nearly as attractive to me (and this is not limited to Android - the same goes for other platforms). Do you feel differently?

A recap of sorts: Swift - better than Objective C if iOS/Cocoa is the goal Livecode - english-like programming language for rapid development.

For whoever stumbles onto this thread, a friend I bumped into recommended the following for designers, too. He knew a bit more about my design background, so he had these in mind when he recommended them: http://www.polymer-project.org/ https://angularjs.org/ http://www.codecademy.com/

If it's just going for an inspired look - it's great. If it's going for a carbon copy of how material design works right now - it's off a little.

http://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-button/demo.html

Neat regardless though.

Yeah that quirk also occurs in the interface that I'm trying mimic, but you're right it is a bit strange and I'll fix that.

http://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-elements/demo.html#paper-button

http://www.polymer-project.org/resources/compatibility.html Even for latest Chrome half of the stuff isn't supported natively yet - performance with polyfills is quite bad from what I read. It's even worse for other browsers. See discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971030 IE 8 & 9 have 8-10% market share. IE10 support is still flaky. Remember, that most sites (not apps) didn't drop IE6 support until it had <1% market share.

tl;dr; It looks more like a demo of bleeding edge web tech, but not something that you can use yet.

Yassss... the submit button is FABulous! But the contrast makes the plus hard to see. Maybe a pink, blue, or red?

Yes, good design has been on the rise for Google and Android recently, and this is the next step, with the Material Design and the Polymer Project.

They even have a dedicated page for design now: www.google.com/design

I know this isn't the Android SDK but the Polymer demo show's how easy it is to implement the z-depth and let the materials render correctly.

http://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-elements/demo.html#paper-shadow

(Especially the last example)

http://www.w3.org/TR/components-intro/

A Guide to Web Components is a nicer read, and it also introduces Polymer, a polyfill.