should I use Box or Grid? - material-ui

Should I be using Box/Component/Stack instead of Grid if I don't care about responsive design?
TL;DR
I am new to material ui. I have been reading the online documentation, blogs and watching the videos.
I'm seeing a lot of people use the Grid for positioning and layout when the design is not intended to be responsive, as in, there will only ever be the one screen size. In this case would it be better to use Box instead of Grid?
My current understanding is that Grid is for responsive design and Box/Container/Stack is for a non-responsive design.
Yes, I know all the designs should be responsive, but I'm working on a project that doesn't care about responsive design.
Thoughts, comments, suggestions?

Related

How do I draw concurrent custom shapes in flutter like this?

I want to create the shapes which are at the bottom of the design, but I'm unable to think of an approach I tried transform.rotate on a container but there are overflow issues. Any kind of help is appreciated. Thanks!
Here's the link to the design, that I want to create.
There are a few solutions for this UI:
You can export the background as an image.
Pros: Save time, easy.
Cons: Performance is not good as solution 2 below (for loading image and app size).
Use canvas (and paint) to draw those curves. If you're not familiar with Canvas in Flutter, you can check this tutorial.
Pros: performance is better (render time is faster and app size is smaller).
Cons: time consuming, sometimes you will need to have good maths knowledge to draw complex UI.
I found a better option for creating custom shapes.
There is this website, which converts shapes to code.
Here's the link: https://fluttershapemaker.com
It saves a lot of time. Thanks.

How to implement Material Speed Dial on Flutter?

Is there any native Flutter library for achieving Material Design Speed Dial?
I found only this FAB documentation, but it doesn't say anything about creating a menu out of it, though Material Design FAB documentation says at the top that FAB is supported in Flutter (it doesn't say how much it supports. Only that it supports, which would lead me to understand that it supports everything in the page).
Should I instead develop mine or look for third party libraries?
Nevermind. I'm creating my own Speed Dial. For now, it is part of a very simple project, but once I test it more and add animations, I'll share a final link.
It still don't have animations, because I'm using Visibility for showing or hiding the buttons, and it was tested only in Scaffold's FAB, placed on bottom right of screen, so no link for now, sorry. Less than an alpha right now (and I still need to study how one shares an API for adding to dependency).
I hope I'll be able to create a simple and light enough implementation. Easy to use and easy to understand if anybody wishes to take a look into the code later on. I've seen some implementations, but they are very complex and create (in my view) unnecessary extra widgets.
Some implementations I found:
https://flutterawesome.com/flutter-plugin-to-implement-a-material-design-speed-dial/
https://flutterawesome.com/flutter-floating-action-button-with-speed-dial/

Fluent Design Menus in Hololens

I'm currently designing a Hololens application and I'm pretty new to everything. The menu right now seems a little "old-school" for my taste. I'd like to create a user-friendly menu that could be pinned in place or move around as the user wishes.
I've been checking out fluent designs and found the DesignLab toolkit (https://unitylist.com/p/19/MR-Design-Labs-Unity) but its from 2017. Is there anything new I could use to make my menus?
You can use the ButtonHolographic from the HoloToolkit Example. These are flat designed uwp buttons. Take a look at the example scenes from the holotoolkit-example.
Check out the PressableButton.prefab in MRTK. This aligns pretty exactly with the system style and fluent design. There's documentation here:
https://microsoft.github.io/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity/Documentation/README_Button.html
It's relatively easy to use the same materials and shaders to create a background panel for text or other things that aren't buttons.
Keep an eye out for how the shader reacts when MRTK's simulated hand approaches it. There's a lot of cool reactive fluent elements there.

SmartGWT skinning

Some SmartGWT components are composed by a lot of small images. This is the case of IButton for example that gets rendered using images.
I want to adapt the original SmartGWT CSS to fit my needs, that are basically color changes.
This answer is not quite accurate..
If you have staff with experience with image-based skinning and appropriate tools (eg Adobe Fireworks), start from whatever skin you like.
If you don't, and you need to change the colors but don't care about niceties like rounded corners in older IE (which are impossible without images), start from Simplicity, or start from the CSS3 rendering mode provided for the 3 most popular skins (from 3.1 on):
http://blog.isomorphic.com/css3-mode/
The latter approach (CSS3 mode) is more visually rich than Simplicity.
It seems, that the best way of skinning an SmartGWT application is starting from the Simplicity theme.
Isomorphic team suggest starting from this theme, as it uses less images that the others themes.
As far as I've read, everything should be done by hand (editing images, and CSS).

iPad scrollable area

I am a complete novice to iPhone/iPad development, but I have OOP experience in other languages. I apologize in advance if this question is rather vague.
What I really want to know is this:
My app idea needs to work in a single view where the view is a scrollable area that is a fixed height (bigger than the viewport). Various different events can happen within this scrollable area. The app will have an immersive feel to it (quite texture/image intensive), but it is not a 'game' as such (think scrollable bookshelf).
Which apple project would be a good way to start this? View-based? OpenGL ES?
How easy is it to make a fixed scrollable area?
From what you describe making a simple UIKit app will suffice. You should start either a window or view based project.
Adding a fixed scrollable are is very easy using a UIScrollView.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/uikit/reference/UIScrollView_Class/Reference/UIScrollView.html