Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager, Polymer
Welcome to the Polymer Summit livestream 2016. Today, we’ll kick off with a keynote about how the core Polymer team is thinking about the project’s past, present, and future. We’ll follow with a full day of sessions covering every aspect of building great web applications using Polymer, including a unique new Polymer experience, and thoughts from our partners. Tune into the livestream below to follow along. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #PolymerSummit.
Sam Thorogood, Developer Programs Engineer
Today, we're announcing that the open source version of Google's Santa Tracker has been updated with the Android and web experiences that ran in December 2015. We extended, enhanced and upgraded our code, and you can see how we used our developer products - including Firebase and Polymer - to build a fun, educational and engaging experience.
To get started, you can check out the code on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Both repositories include instructions so you can build your own version.
Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired experiences, games and educational content by exploring Santa's Village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.
Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.
We hope that this update inspires you to make your own magical experiences based on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa Tracker!
Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager
We’re excited to announce that the full speaker list and talk schedule has been released for the first ever Polymer Summit! Find the latest details on our newly launched site here. Look forward to talks about topics like building full apps with Polymer, Polymer and ES6, adaptive UI with Material Design, and performance patterns in Polymer.
The Polymer Summit will start on Monday, September 14th with an evening of Code Labs, followed by a full day of talks on Tuesday, September 15th. All of this will be happening at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, right on the IJ river in downtown Amsterdam. All tickets to the summit were claimed on the first day, but you can sign up for the waitlist to be notified, should any more tickets become available.
Can’t make it to the summit? Sign up here if you’d like to receive updates on the livestream and tune in live on September 15th on polymer-project.org/summit. We’ll also be publishing all of the talks as videos on the Google Developers YouTube Channel.
Posted by Addy Osmani, Staff Developer Platform Engineer
Back in 2014, Google published the material design specification with a goal to provide guidelines for good design and beautiful UI across all device form factors. Today we are releasing our first effort to bring this to websites using vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript. We’re calling it Material Design Lite (MDL).
MDL makes it easy to add a material design look and feel to your websites. The “Lite” part of MDL comes from several key design goals: MDL has few dependencies, making it easy to install and use. It is framework-agnostic, meaning MDL can be used with any of the rapidly changing landscape of front-end tool chains. MDL has a low overhead in terms of code size (~27KB gzipped), and a narrow focus—enabling material design styling for websites.
Get started now and give it a spin or try one of our examples on CodePen.
MDL is a complimentary implementation to the Paper elements built with Polymer. The Paper elements are fully encapsulated components that can be used individually or composed together to create a material design-style site, and support more advanced user interaction. That said, MDL can be used alongside the Polymer element counterparts.
MDL optimises for websites heavy on content such as marketing pages, text articles and blogs. We've built responsive templates to show the broadness of sites that can be created using MDL that can be downloaded from our Templates page. We hope these inspire you to build great looking sites.
Blogs:
Text-heavy content sites:
Dashboards:
Standalone articles:
and more.
MDL includes a rich set of components, including material design buttons, text-fields, tooltips, spinners and many more. It also include a responsive grid and breakpoints that adhere to the new material design adaptive UI guidelines.
The MDL sources are written in Sass using BEM. While we hope you'll use our theme customizer or pre-built CSS, you can also download the MDL sources from GitHub and build your own version. The easiest way to use MDL is by referencing our CDN, but you can also download the CSS or import MDL via npm or Bower.
The complete MDL experience works in all modern evergreen browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge) and Safari, but gracefully degrades to CSS-only in browsers like IE9 that don’t pass our Cutting-the-mustard test. Our browser compatibility matrix has the most up to date information on the browsers MDL officially supports.
We've been working with the designers evolving material design to build in additional thinking for the web. This includes working on solutions for responsive templates, high-performance typography and missing components like badges. MDL is spec compliant for today and provides guidance on aspects of the spec that are still being evolved. As with the material design spec itself, your feedback and questions will help us evolve MDL, and in turn, how material design works on the web.
We’re sure you have plenty of questions and we have tried to cover some of them in our FAQ. Feel free to hit us up on GitHub or Stack Overflow if you have more. :)
MDL is built on the core technologies of the web you already know and use every day—CSS, HTML and JS. By adopting MDL into your projects, you gain access to an authoritative and highly curated implementation of material design for the web. We can’t wait to see the beautiful, modern, responsive websites you’re going to build with Material Design Lite.
Today we released the 1.0 version of the Polymer library. Polymer is a new way of thinking about building web applications - a sugaring layer on top of Web Components, making it easy for you to create interoperable custom elements. These elements can then be put together to create app-like immersive experiences on the web.
Since the “Developer Preview” release, we’ve re-written the library from the ground up, focusing on cross-browser performance while keeping the developer-friendly ergonomics. The new library is about 3x faster on Chrome, 4x faster on Safari, and a third less code than in developer preview. And it’s ready to be used in production applications.
We’ve updated the polymer-project.org site with documentation for the 1.0 release. Major new and updated features include:
It’s easier than ever to create high-quality, production-ready elements using Polymer, to use in your app or share with other developers.
Check out the many brand-new element product lines built by the Polymer team with the Polymer elements catalog. There you can browse for elements to help create or add features to your web app - whether you need buttons or layouts, Google maps or push notifications. For just about any problem you might need to solve on the web, there’s an element for that.
Looking for a fast and easy way to get started building a production-ready web application using Polymer? Use the Polymer starter kit. Packed with the latest elements, ready-to-use boilerplate, and an end-to-end toolchain to use from development through production deployment, the starter kit works out of the box so you can focus on adding features right away.
We’re incredibly excited about this release, and can’t wait to see what you’ll build!
Posted by Jason Titus, Senior Director of Engineering
This morning, we kicked off our 8th annual Google I/O conference, joined by 5,600 developers at Moscone Center, 530 I/O Extended communities around the world, and millions via the I/O Live stream. This year’s event is focused on delivering incredible experiences on mobile and helping developers build successful businesses through these key themes: Develop, Engage, and Earn.
During the keynote, we had a number of announcements that covered the evolution of the mobile platform, tools for Android, iOS, and Web developers, and the push towards more immersive mobile experiences with VR. Here’s a closer look at the news:
Posted by Ankur Kotwal, Software Engineer
The holiday spirit is about giving and though we’re early into April, we’re still in that spirit. Today, we’re announcing that Google's Santa Tracker is now open source on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Now you can see how we’ve used many of our developer products to build a fun and engaging experience that runs across the web and Android.
Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired games and an interactive North Pole village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.
Now that the source code is also available, developers can see many of the parts that come together to make Santa Tracker. We hope that developers are inspired to make their own magical experiences.
