Material Design

Meta dev
1

A while back Bhante Sujato sent me this link on material design, the new user interface guidelines for Android apps. Eventually we would like to provide apps for most of the major phone and tablet operating systems and while we could use something like Apache Cordova to just wrap up the site code, material design offers a way to provide our content in a way mobile device users expect and could possibly become something quite lovely.

That said, I’m not the man to do this. Something I see in various places is the separation of “Plumbing” and “Porcelain”, the former opreating out of view of the user but making the latter - what you see and interact with - possible.

The website of SuttaCentral.net was developed with Blake an I working on the plumbing in Python and implementing the designs of Bhante Sujato in HTML 5 and CSS (of course there was a bit of overlap). I can imagine a similar division would be possible in a native mobile app.

So, if you know about this sort of thing, or want to, please feel free to discuss it here.

2

We’ve recently engaged a dev, David, in the states to help with refinements for mobile and so on. While we haven’t discussed a full mobile app, or a “material” overhaul, some relevant concepts have come up. At the moment I’ve asked him to do some more careful testing of performance on various mobile platforms, as well as tweaking and refining some of the UI elements along the way. David has only just set up SC locally, and we hope to see some progress in the next week or so. I’ll let him know about this forum.