The (in)complete story behind adopting Material Design Style on PowerShell.
In 2014 Google has released a new software design philosophy.
They called it "Material Design".
I'm calling it a philosophy, not a software design language nor a graphical framework because that's exactly what Google has thought about, while designing it.
They wanted a unified user interface design concept to serve their various platforms. Back then it was Android OS being implemented on smartphones, Chrome browser gaining popularity and beating-up IE and later on joined the emerging Chromebook project with ChromeOS.
As the name suggests, the idea was to simplify the way UI looks and feels by treating virtual elements drawn on the screen as being made of "real-life" Materials (physical like), Kind of an "ink on paper" feeling.
Material Design was influenced by the era of post 3D design (i.e. ditching 3D elements for flat ones), a trend that was adopted by Microsoft and Apple. So elements in MD are two-dimensional-like, yet to meet the physical concept they have a slight shadow just like a sheet of paper being slightly raised.
In 2018, the second version of MD was released, containing bug fixes, enhanced icons library and some more fun stuff.
At the Android Dev Summit (October 27-28, 2021) Google has unveiled Material Design 3 (Branded as "Material You").
All those years Google didn't put any effort on Desktop apps using either Windows, MacOS or Linux, however they did something great - they released MD as an open source project, completely free for any usage.
Then came the ButchersBoy...
James Willock (AKA ButchersBoy), a brilliant guy from the UK with a true passion for challenging projects, decided to pick up the glove and make Material Design accessible for WPF applications. In 2015 he released his first version of MDIX ("Material Design In Xaml") project, where he ported most of MD's objects to XAML allowing developers to get the same MD look and feel on their WPF and UWP apps. Willock is also the owner of 'Dragablz' project, a very cool library that allows drag & drop and tear-out of objects.
Later on, in 2019, Kevin Bost from the state of Washington (nick name Keboo) took the lead on MDIX. Currently, MDIX, as an open source project of course, is being constantly maintained by more than 130 contributors.
Not long ago, Keboo was mentioning that MDIX will be updated to comply with most of MD 3 standards and guidelines (hooray!).
Update: there is actually a Material Design 3 Roadmap #2475 on MDIX's GitHub
and Keboo is calling all contributors to help on that. Can't wait...
PowerShell getting a booster shot...
As PowerShell swims naturally in the .NET framework pool, it is a long known fact that WPF can be implemented in PS GUI scripts.
Xaml files (the visual part of WPF) can be imported into a script and its content can be rendered in a window opened by that script. That's old news.
What's REALLY cool is the fact that with a small effort, all the neat things MD has to offer, can be implemented in a PowerShell GUI script (it can be called a PowerShell app cause it's no longer a traditional PowerShell cmdlet or script).
In this blog, I will post a lot of stuff helping you guys develop some gorgeous looking PowerShell GUI apps, leveraging the power of MaterialDesignInXaml library (plus the help of some old friends like Dragablz and Mahapps).
Follow me guys and ditch those awful looking windows95-like jalopies you keep in your PSscripts folder.
MaterialDesignInXaml project can be found here.
Google's Material Design official site