I want to make a web app that uses a UI similar to Google Keep. I want to be able to have chips of the same size that can be dynamically added/removed that expand into larger cards with more options. What kind of layout should I use in Polymer?
Here are some quick sketches of what I want to accomplish.
There's likely a number of ways you can go, probably best you just try some things & find the approach you like. To help get started I think some of the core-animated-pages demos would help. Here are a couple that you may be able to leverage to get sort of close to your design:
https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~gongliang13/polymer/polymer-tutorial-master/components/core-animated-pages/demos/grid.html
https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~gongliang13/polymer/polymer-tutorial-master/components/core-animated-pages/demos/music.html
how should we set the xml layout in android that supports different screen sizes.
I tried using wrap content and match parent but its not working properly. Please guide me for this.
Thanks in advance.
The comment about, Supporting Multiple Screens is defiantly a good starting place! By default your xml does support different screen sizes.
Although the system performs scaling and resizing to make your application work on different screens, you should make the effort to optimize your application for different screen sizes and densities. In doing so, you maximize the user experience for all devices and your users believe that your application was actually designed for their devices—rather than simply stretched to fit the screen on their devices.
However, like it says you need to optimize it. This refers to images or a completely different xml per screen size/orientation. Does this help any?
If you need something a little more specific to your situation you'll need to provide more information.
I am into a project in university, I would like to know that how can I use liquid layout in android so that different screen sizes must see the application according to its resolution?
In simple words, I would like to create an application whose layout is perfect in all the type of screens :)
I know how to create it in simple html/css in websites for PCs, but how to do it in android?
Can anyone please give suggestions/help/tutorial link?
Thanks,
Usman
Android provides "liquid" layouts out of the box - the layout dimensions and contained elements adapt to screen resolution automatically. It is gracefully handled by the Android framework. There are various kind of layouts available (LinearLayout, FrameLayout etc.) so you need to check carefully which type of layout is the best for you.
You should avoid AbsoluteLayout. While it is true it lets you specify exact locations (x/y coordinates) of its children it is less flexible and harder to maintain than other types of layouts without absolute positioning. It is now deprecated anyway.
Useful links:
To read more about different layouts see: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/layout-objects.html
Good tutorials are also available here: http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/views/index.html in the "Layouts" section.
AbsoluteLayout doc: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/AbsoluteLayout.html
Update:
Layout itself will adapt to different kind of resolutions automatically but you need to keep it mind that elements contained in a layout can look differently. The same image will be smaller on high-res screen than on low-res screen. Luckily, Android provides a way to deal with this problem in a simple manner. You can supply different images depending on the resolution that a device has (this is a bit of a simplification because there are other factors eg. pixel density in addition to resolution that matters). By the same token, it is also possible to supply a different layout but it is not that common.
Links:
Full story on multiple screen support: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
Sample code: http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/MultiResolution/index.html
I want to build a program that will (as part of what it's doing) display lines organically growing and interacting horizontally across the screen. Here's a sample image, just imagine the lines sprouting from the left and growing to the right:
The lines would look like the lines used on Google Maps Transit Overlay or OnNYTurf's transit pages.
It's a personal project, so I'm open to just about any language and library combination. But I don't know where to start. What have you used in the past to create graphics that are similar to this? What would you recommend? I want it to run on Windows without any extras needed (.Net is fine), and it doesn't have to run elsewhere. I needs to run as an actual program, not javascript in the browser.
There's obviously no 'right' answer to this, but the purpose isn't to start an argument about X better than Y but rather just find a list of graphics toolkits that do simple 2D graphics that people recommend because of their ease of use or community or whatever.
Processing may be just the tool for you.
Like you said, there are many ways to tackle this problem. Me personally, being it is a windows based project, I would go with the .NET based implementation utilizing WPF. There are tutorials on how to use the 2D drawing feature out there ( http://www.wpftutorial.net/DrawOnPhysicalDevicePixels.html for one ) Again, there is no right answer here. I might also pick some new technology and let your project be a mechanism to learn something new, providing you do not have a looming deadline.
Let me explain what I mean by "two-dimensional code editor": imagine of using Inkscape or Gimp in a big canvas (say infinite). The "T - add text" tool is used to write the code. Additionally, all function definitions will be framed and links will connect the called functions.
In other words: you have a very large sheet of (virtual) paper where you can write.
It would be really useful. I don't want to write code as a long list of lines, especially now that big monitors are cheaper.
Is such a code editor out there?
What's your opinion? Would you use a 2d code editor?
I've written 3 or 4 visual editors and my second one worked like this, that was for java and c++ (never published, though I did use it for some published research work)
I still don't like much to write my code 'as a long list of lines'. My point is, after trying a system like this, I tried a windowed system (class outlines in windows, right click to open code editors), then a tree based system...
in the long run (I wrote several apps using all of those), the tree based system with non overlapping windows felt at once most scalable (to different monitor sizes) and foremost, most productive, because dragging the text boxes and links and/or windows in the first version was necessary, without adding much to the programming experience, so it felt wasteful.
If you want to try some of this stuff out, you can google antegram for java (java only) antegram for web (javascript/php/actionscript) and ee-ide (on oogtech.org). I'm not sure if I could dig up the original c++/java textbox + links editor (which could collapse graphs as well, and had an infinite canvas, so pretty close to what you describe).
I'm not working on this as much as I used to as few programmers ever seemed to like it except me, but if you like working the tree way, or feel like adding stuff for your own purposes, ee-ide would be the way to go, as it's nicely modular and easy to extend compared to the rest.
On the commercial side, you can configure visual studio to work with UML-like diagrams. I have a feel it might be a little too heavy (although it's definitely more coding than UML oriented), but I'm not sure, I haven't really tried yet.
This probably doesn't answer your question exactly, but anyway.
Have a look at the NodeBox beta . It is a visual programming environment mostly for creating generative graphics. You can program and edit the nodes with python code, connect and reuse them in multiple ways. (Windows and Mac OS)
Also worth mentioning (in terms of concept) is Field . It is for programming performances and arranges bits of code on a stage/timeline. Very interesting but also very confusing. (Mac OS only)
Third one is vvvv. It is used a lot by graphical artists to create realtime 3d visuals. Node based. (Windows only)
NodeBox and Field are open-source, so if you are looking to create something yourself you can see how it's done there.
Check this out. I came across it today and remembered this question.
Code Bubbles
Developers spend significant time
reading and navigating code fragments
spread across multiple locations. The
file-based nature of contemporary IDEs
makes it prohibitively difficult to
create and maintain a simultaneous
view of such fragments. We propose a
novel user interface metaphor for code
understanding and maintanence based on
collections of lightweight, editable
fragments called bubbles, which form
concurrently visible working sets.
The essential goal of this project is
to make it easier for developers to
see many fragments of code (or other
information) at once without having to
navigate back and forth. Each of these
fragments is shown in a bubble.
A bubble is a fully editable and
interactive view of a fragment such as
a method or collection of member
variables. Bubbles, in contrast to
windows, have minimal border
decoration, avoid clipping their
contents by using automatic code
reflow and elision, and do not overlap
but instead push each other out of the
way. Bubbles exist in a large,
pannable 2-D virtual space where a
cluster of bubbles comprises a
concurrently visible working set.
Bubbles support a lightweight grouping
mechanism, and further support
connections between them.
A quantiative user study indicates
that Code Bubbles increased
performance significantly for two
controlled code understanding tasks. A
qualitative user study with 23
professional developers indicates
substantial interest and enthusiasm
for the approach, despite the radical
departure from what developers are
used to.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm
At one point, LabView had a programming mode like this. You connected program blocks together in a graphical way.
It's been so long since I've used LabView that I don't know if it is still the same.
For me, the MVVM pattern means that there's no code behind the UI controls anyway. The logic is all in a class with properties.
The properties use WPF databinding to update the UI controls. For example, on the form or window, page, whatever, MySearchButton.IsEnabled is bound to ViewModel.MySearchButtonIsEnabled property. So the app logic runs in the ViewModel class and just sets its own properties and the UI updates automatically.
Although this is specific to MS WPF the pattern actually stems from SmallTalk and is found across the development field as MVP. Without WPF one would need to write the databinding or 'presenter' logic, which is common.
This means the UI can be torn off and a new one pasted-in really quickly and with little code knowledge from the UI guy - who, in an ideal world, is a crack creative guy that drives a 70s Citroen.
So my point is that, although it sounds like a neat innovation, a 2D editor like this would be assisting a coding style that is no longer considered optimal.