Support of Material Concepts

[rbolder]

I was wondering if SmartClient has plans to provide material design support within their products?

I am being asked to investigate converting my SmartClient based application to support some of the material concepts as outlined in https://www.google.com/design/spec/a...eraction.html# and have gotten part of the way there with your current animation functions but I am stuck on animateResize as I couldn't find a way to indicate start point and direction to fulfill the Point of origin based animation.

Any timelines or pointers are appreciated.

[Isomorphic]

You can basically think of this as the widget animating position upward as it simultaneously animates size, so you want animateRect().

Overall, we like some but not all of what we see in Material Design.

The physicality of interface elements, careful attention to z-order, high-quality shadowing etc are nice.

Some controls are too minimalist. We think having input fields be just a line is a mistake, for example. That kind of thing degrades usability because input controls become less easy to recognize.

We really don't like the fact that buttons pop forward when pressed. Things don't come toward you when you press on them, so we feel this produces a kind of cognitive finger sprain.

We also think the "ink effect" is superfluous and distracting.

So at the moment we have rather limited plans to incorporate bits of Material Design. But there's nothing stopping you from fully implementing their design with SmartClient controls, and Feature Sponsorship would apply to something like having a setting to change the default MenuButton animation to animate both axes, or other small tweaks like that.