Material APEX Part 1: 2015 Status & Direction
I am starting a series of blog posts on how to use Material APEX, a theme based on Material Design guidelines.
Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to comment, retweet and report bugs. I've been overwhelmed with positive feedback and it’s very rewarding to be part of such a generous community.
I believe the theme is now advanced enough that I can finally take time to promote it and make better documentation, besides of course continuing development.
A bit of background
I started developing the theme back in February immediately after discovering Materialize. At the time, APEX 5 was not out yet and everything was developed in EA3.
Development
For anyone who’s impressed with the design of Material APEX, I've got to give all the credit to the folks at Materialize. I have done very little design work except for the Interactive Report and Tabular Form adaptation.
My effort lies in integrating the framework into APEX and making it as generic as possible. Creating templates, template options, replicating the grid and so on.
Material APEX isn’t so much a technical feat, but it’s a complex assembled puzzle.
Beta & Feedback
Since the very first preview I shared, I had to point out many times that it’s not ready for production. Being the only developer on a side project does not allow me to do as as much testing as I would like, that is why reporting bugs is extremely important, don't be shy!
Help from the experts
Kscope15 was very valuable for the theme’s development because I was able to speak to Patrick Wolf & Shakeeb and they led me to rework on a simpler Grid Layout and to support Theme Roller which was a big step in the right direction.
Current Status
Bugs aside, I consider the current version at the time of this writing (0.8.1) as stable. There will be new features in the future, less breaking changes to existing features and as much bug fixes as I receive.
Direction & Future
I said, I expect a fair amount of bugs to come out in the future, and PLEASE do keep filling bugs. That is why I'm open-sourcing it. Once a few patch sets are out, my intent is to have Material APEX as a real alternative to the Universal Theme.
I will continue to update the theme as long it receives feedback and feature requests.
Try Material APEX here.
Download Material APEX here.
This blog post is part of a series.
Part 1: 2015 Status & Statement of Direction
Part 2: The Grid
Part 3: Colors & Styling
Part 4: 2018 Status & Statement of Direction
Part 5: Migrating your existing application (soon)