Grial roadmap

[jpbrocca]

Hi everybody!

We have made the roadmap for next Grial version. In the process we had some disagreements so we -luckily- thought that the best way would be to listen to our customers :)

So our next version will simply add more screens covering more common Mobile UI patterns. Also we will provide more themes over Grial and support for tablets.

I would like to hear your thoughts about what screens you would like to have, so please add your comments on this thread.

Also, we welcome any feature request and suggestions. If we could not make it for our next version, those could be considered for future updates. Once we collect all your feedback we will make a poll and the most voted features will be added to the kit.

We encourage you all to participate and help us to help you :)

Thanks in advance! JP

[markdav-is]

I'm moving to PRISM for MVVM and it would be awesome if you supported Prizm OOTB.

[ghost]

Great documentation would be awesome. This comes from a newbie!

[ssotir]

I would love to see something covering the map control with custom pins and callouts. Why not a data binding feature.

[mrutter]

Hello everybody. This is a first "wish"-list of suggested features:

1. Support for UWP/Windows Mobile.
2. Deploy GrialKit as Visual Studio Template/Templates (avoiding copy of solution, renaming namespaces, changing projects GUID and so on). I was thinking to two different cases: a template for create a new complete solution; more templates to add singles features to a GrialKit solution (for eaxample, after creating a GrialKit based solution, ability to add items such as "Login Form", "Product List", "Social Profile", ...).
3. A VS tool that allows developers to easily change GrialKit settings (colors and so on). BTW, my team and me started to develope such a tool but we had to stop developing due to time reasons.
4. Support for Materials Icons (https://design.google.com/icons/)
5. +1 for tablet support, of course!

... more suggestions to come in a next comment.

Thank you very much for your great work!

[kandiva]

First remove the unrealistic licencing terms. Make more screen templates for each type, to make it worth for $200 you should have at least 200 screen templates

[dtila]

Hi. In my oppionion the most important thing would be to move to a subversioned system so you can see the changes between the version which your app is using and the new one.

If is quite hard to do this, and you need a lot of diffs

[deman4ik]

1. UWP support
2. Tablets support
3. Good new CarouselView implementation - Image Gallery and Content Rotator
4. CustomTabBar like CustomNavBar

[kolchy]

• I'd love to see some more advanced XF features (deep links, app content search, social sharing etc)
• 👍 Custom pins on maps
• 👍 For new CarouselView implementation

[abbasali-io]

• +1 for Visual Studio template, that would make things a lot efficient and easier
• easy upgrade mechanism for current versions
• examples for Data Form would be great, which is kind of non existent in current version
• better and uptodate documentation, since there is no use of having a great theme if you cannot understand how to implement one.

[NVentimiglia]

• Groups (of users) is a pretty common social page.
• Purchase Orders / Store Checkout (Orders with line items, in general)
• ItemTemplate (for list item) with swipe left/right commands.
• Global Toast notifications
• Better navigation documentation. This is especially useful since Xamarin Navigation is inherently buggy. I noticed the root page was a master/detail page which sometimes did not have a master half (e.g. when on the welcome page). Explanation of how this works would be great.

[rsseurope]

• Scheduler with a day view and weekview!
• Screens for data processing apps
• Fontawesome icons in the navigation bar buttons

[baris1987]

• Better documentation.
• Better customization possibilities.
• More separated examples, than one huge example.
• Better licensing conditions for very small teams (1-2 developers).

[caseyniemann]

Swipe Right and Swipe Left List Bar Top and Bottom Menu Bar (See Outlook & GHangouts) Right Hand Pull Tab--See Dropbox

[babernethy]

• CarouselView already mentioned.
• Update FontAwesome version - needed some of the new icons (did this manually, would be nice to see it in the base package).
• Be nice if the reference library was a NuGet package (or secure equivalent) so updates could come out more often and more painlessly.
• iPad/tablet already mentioned - be nice to have even some "smart" pages that could adapt between phone/tablet and not just be "universal" (sometimes the UI is better customized)
• PageDialog/Alert/ActionSheet

[babernethy]

Another common thing I seem to be adding is a wait/loading/progress-bar type overlay - a nicely designed and implemented option(s) for this functionality would be nice ...

[NVentimiglia]

On the font awesome note, I am using a static const file with all the icon names with the character code. eg.

<Label
          Grid.Column="1"
          HorizontalOptions="Center"
          VerticalOptions="Center"
          Text="{Binding Source={x:Static local:UXFontIcons.FAFileText}}"
          FontSize="28"
          TextColor="{StaticResource ComplementColorDark }"
          Style="{StaticResource FontIcon}">
        <Label.GestureRecognizers>
          <TapGestureRecognizer Tapped="OnBack" />
        </Label.GestureRecognizers>
      </Label>

Might be a good policy

[jpbrocca]

@NVentimiglia, yes it is a good idea.

I didn't have the time to write our plans for font icons but since you mention this I am going to write them here :)

• Grial will come by default with its own font as primary icons provider, mainly to be used for circles, and basic shapes.
• There will be an alternative font for icons that will be defined by the user (by default Fontawesome)
• For each font we will provide the dictionary using the names from the font glyphs
• We will provide a tool to generate the dictionaries from the fonts
• Our customers will be able to include their own fonts created using tools like fontastic or fontello.

Thanks! JP

[jpbrocca]

Hi again guys :) First of all, thank you for your suggestions!

I have collected them on a Trello board: https://trello.com/b/NwNdlHQK/grial-2-0

This board is public, so you can vote your favorite features and also add comments.

Best, JP

[jpbrocca]

Hi @baris2887, thanks for your suggestions!

So I would like to get more info about your suggestions about:

• Better documentation.
  • Can you specify which parts of the documentation are you more interested ?
• Better customization possibilities.
  • Can you provide more context/samples of what you have in mind ?
• Better licensing conditions for very small teams (1-2 developers).
  • Can you provide more info about those conditions ?

Thanks a lot! JP

[jpbrocca]

Hi @rsseurope, thanks for your suggestions :)

Can you provide some sample about your suggestions:

• Scheduler with a day view and weekview!
• Screens for data processing apps

If you could add some screen shots or links to some samples (could be an app to download from a store for instance) that would be great.

Thank you very much! Best, JP

[rsseurope]

@jpbrocca thanks for your interest in my suggestions!

1. With the scheduler i mean some sort of planner tool like this:

these should be able to databind to appointments and should be stylable (for instantance the time between rows)

1. screens for data processing apps are a little harder to describe. but maybe the following example will help. This is a form that is used in a web app for acquiring information. As you can see a lot of field with data are available. Maybe you could design a way to make this kinds of screens beautifull and userfriendly in xamarin apps

[jpbrocca]

Hi @rsseurope, definitively I am interested in all of our customer's suggestions so I am the one that should thank you :)

Ok, for the first one (scheduler) we can create all the templates, bindings and the screens to support that. Is that what you are looking for ?

For your second suggestion we will keep it in mind and see what we can do for such cases :)

Best regards and again thanks! JP

[rsseurope]

@jpbrocca perfect!

[DavidSilverlight]

I would love to see the following included in templates for the upcoming roadmap.

a) Mapping functionality b) Video Player functionality c) Rich Textbook Editor d) Tab control e) Entry validation behaviors, similar to the email and password, for things like phone, dob, etc.

[rex232]

I hope coming version can include a blank and clean template

[Korayem]

Hey @jpbrocca :)

I already sent you this on email, but since you're collecting things here, I thought of re-sharing it.

The market doesn't have a feature rich Tabs UI Control which is, IMHO, one of the most used UX design patterns in mobile. Current TabbedPage is nice, but renders totally different experiences across Android and iOS with little to no control over layouts.

Features

Would love to see the following features:

• With/without Icons. Actually, each Tab should be templated to allow any layout we need.
• Show them at Top or Bottom
• Swipe back/forward between sub-pages. Page type is ContentPage and not ContentView because the former has events that we can hookup, unlike the latter.
• Have same experience across Android or iOS
• Nice to have: Mix both Top with Bottom. For example, to have a Bottom Tabs called "Dashboard" and when tapped, the page loaded will contain a Top Tabs with further different pages from bottom. See below screenshot.

Example

[Loai-Alhalabi]

Hi,

• it's better to make the package supporting Arabic and RTL Layouts

[JamesPetras]

1. Tablet support
2. Horizontal list view (e.g. grey menu - http://a5.mzstatic.com/eu/r30/Purple41/v4/d8/cd/01/d8cd01bc-8742-2295-c0f8-e049825d6b45/screen696x696.jpeg
3. Custom tabbed page https://lh6.ggpht.com/p3TzR2lnejWUhsucWJiGaNIGptKfpCPVhRZyYfd6x9eBXRvY_z8_NRiBvBD6f2p1wg=h310

[angelcalvasp]

UWP Support :D

[mrctito]

1- Better documentation about each page template and control, showing how it compares with Xamarin default pages and controls.

2- More separated examples, small samples for each page template.

3- A lot of comments in source code.

4- Global Toasts notifications

5- Swipe Right and Swipe Left List Bar

[anomaly2]

Modal error/notification dialogs

[wkunker]

1. Documentation is sparse and doesn't seem to cover many of the basic conditions one can encounter when using this product; I have encountered more than a few Grial-specific problems which I could not find mention of in the Grial documentation. It seems like there's a typo in every other paragraph, but that seems to be par for the course in the Xamarin world (Xamarin/Forms documentation has the same problem).

2. The way the license is enforced is ridiculous. You can't even run your application for development purposes if you change the bundle ID. I've encountered a few situations where this made my life more difficult at work. Do you really think developers are going to risk illegally using your product in production over 200 dollars? As it stands, I would not recommend Grial to anyone because of this restriction alone.