Tari Ibaba is a software developer with years of experience building websites and apps. He has written extensively on a wide range of programming topics and has created dozens of apps and open-source libraries.
Welcome to this brand new tutorial series, where we’re going to be creating a to-do list app all the way from start to finish using the popular Vuetify.js UI library. You can create a new Vuetify project now and follow along if you want. By the time we’re done, you should have a broader knowledge of the features offered by the framework. We’ll go through a notable amount of Vuetify components, including toolbars, cards, forms, lists, navigation drawers and more.
Vuetify uses the v-toolbar component for toolbars. To create one, we’ll need to wrap it in a card component — although we can also use it in conjunction with the v-navigation-drawer component.
Similar to some other UI libraries, Vuetify uses themes to specify styles that affect all its components. In the following code, we set the colour of the toolbar to primary, which is a colour determined by Vuetify theme settings. We haven’t customized the theme, so this colour will be the default blue.
The title shows now, but observe that its colour is black. We should make it white so it stands out clearer against the blue toolbar background by using the dark property to apply Vuetify’s dark theme variant to v-toolbar .
Many other Vuetify components also have this property, to allow them to be changed to their dark mode. Certain colours of different parts of the component might change, depending on the component. For v-toolbar-title, the colour of any text inside of it becomes white, as you can see:
Removing the Toolbar Roundness
Looking closely at the toolbar, you’ll see that it has a little curvature at each of its corners. This curvature is controlled by the rounded property. We’ll remove the roundness by setting rounded to 0:
We’re off to a great start! Let’s move on to our next episode in this series, where we learn how to use lists, margins and checkboxes to display a list of tasks and add interactivity to our new app.
To start, we’ll display the colors. We’ll create a colors variable, initialized to an array of all the colors of the rainbow — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
To create the carousel we’ll use the v-carousel component. We’ll use v-carousel-item to add a slide to the carousel. Using the v-for directive we loop through each color in colors and add an item to the carousel to show it. We’ll do this by creating a v-sheet component and setting its color property.
Now let’s display the sentence. It’s a 7-word sentence, so each word is displayed in one slide. We’ll position the word at the vertical and horizontal centre of the slide using v-row. With the JavaScript string split() method, we’ll divide the sentence into an array of the seven words.
Look at the icons that indicate each slide. They’re round. Let’s change them to short rectangles each, by changing the delimiter-icon property of the carousel to mdi-minus:
You can see there’s a grey rectangle at the bottom of the carousel. This is the background of the delimiters. We don’t want this rectangle to be visible so let’s set the hide-delimiter-background property to hide it:
To make the carousel automatically transition to the next slide without having to click the right arrow, let’s set the cycle property. The interval determines the amount of time the carousel remains on one of its items before moving on to the next. Here we set an interval of one second.
We can also change the animation the carousel uses when it wants to switch out the item it is currently displaying. By default, the current item slides out to the left as the next one simultaneously slides in. Let us make the current item fade out instead, while the incoming one fades in. This is the fade-transition we set to the transition property of the v-carousel-item. We’ll also do the same for the reverse transition — the current slide will fade out as the previous one fades in.
Designing a great user interface from scratch can take a lot of effort. Apart from the skill required for constructing a delightful user experience, you’ll have to worry about things like creating your own design system —with its own icons, colour combinations, typography, etc. while ensuring that the system is fairly consistent with what your users are used to so they don’t get disoriented with the style. Of course, you’ll also have to remember to make sure your apps are mobile responsive so they remain functional and aesthetically pleasing on devices of all sizes.
Luckily there are tons of CSS UI libraries that help simplify this process and work with different JavaScript frameworks. For Vue.js in particular, Vuetify is one of the most popular frameworks out there that you can use to quickly build good-looking and responsive applications.
Introducing Vuetify
Vuetify is an open-source UI component library that allows you to create web apps with stunning visuals without much effort. You can easily add common UI features such as carousels, toolbars, navigation drawers, dialogs, cards, and tables, that already look great to your app. such It has over 33,000 stars on GitHub and is frequently updated by developers. It is based on the well-known Material Design system developed by Google and used by the company in practically all its apps and websites. As stated on its official website:
Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design. Backed by open-source code, Material streamlines collaboration between designers and developers, and helps teams quickly build beautiful products.
That says it all. Using Material Design for your websites and apps would be a smart move indeed. It has been the design language of every major non-customized version of Android since Android Lollipop (5.1), which was released as far back as 2014. Because of its popularity, adopting the Material Design guidelines will give your apps a consistent design that a huge number of people out there are already familiar with.
Creating the app
In this tutorial, we’re going to be getting started with Vuetify by creating a simple Vue.js project which makes use of some features the framework provides. Here’s what our homepage is going to look like when we’re done:
When the user enters a message and clicks the Shoutbutton, a notification will appear with a shouty form of the message.
Creating a new project
To get started, use the Vue CLI to create a new Vue project in a shell window. Let’s call it vuetify-app:
vue create vuetify-app
Let’s move to our project directory in the shell using this command:
cd vuetify-app
Let’s add Vuetify to our project using the Vue CLI. While there are other ways to include Vuetify in a Vue.js app, this is one of the easiest and most straightforward:
vue add vuetify
When asked to choose a preset, choose Default. This preset is okay and recommended for most projects, including the one we’ll be building.
After installing Vuetify, run the project using npm start or yarn start and navigate to localhost:8080 in a new tab in your browser. You’ll see that the standard Vue.js boilerplate has been altered to the one of Vuetify:
Let’s open up src/App.vue in our project directory and clear out this boilerplate until we’re left with this:
The v-app component is now the root of our application. It replaced the default Vue entry point (which was <div id=”app”> in the Vue.js boilerplate). The v-main component is supposed to serve as the root of the main content of our app — just like the main HTML element.
One thing you notice right away is the v- prefix in the component names. All the components that come from Vuetify have this prefix. This is the naming convention used to indicate that the components are part of its library, similar to how custom directives are named in Vue.
Let’s add a text field to the app, using the v-text-field component. We’ll use the label property to set a placeholder value. We also create a message property for a two-way input binding with the text field, so whenever a user edits the text in the text field, message will be updated accordingly. This variable will come in handy for eventually displaying the notification.
Notice we wrapped v-text-field in a v-container component. v-container adds some padding between its children components and other components outside it.
Adding the Button and the Snackbar
Next, let’s add a button using the v-btn component. We’ll center this element by wrapping it in a div and assigning a text-center class to the div. This class is made available by Vuetify for centering text, as the name implies. We’ll supply a method named shout() to handle clicks on the button.
We’ll also add a snackbar for the notifications using the v-snackbar component. In the shout() click handler, we’ll set a new showSnackbar property to true. v-snackbar is bound to this property. Setting it to true will make the snackbar pop up. After a few seconds, v-snackbar will set this variable back to false so the snackbar can be hidden again.
Right now, clicking the button just displays an empty notification. To make the snackbar show the shouty version of the message the user entered, we’ll create a new variable, loudMessage . In the shout() click handler, we’ll set this variable to the capitalized form of the value of message using the JavaScript toUpperCase() string method, and concatenate it with three exclamation marks. We’ll make this message a text child of the v-snackbar element.
Let’s customize the snackbar. Currently, it fades in at the bottom centre of the screen. Let’s make it slide in from the bottom left by modifying some properties of the element. There are many other values we could set the transition property to, but for our purposes, we need to set it to slide-y-reverse-transition . To move the snackbar to left we’ll set the left property to true. Notice we use a colon (: ) before left so that true gets evaluated as the boolean value true, instead of the string “true”.
Even with this small app, I hope you’ve been able to see for yourself how much work UI libraries like Vuetify can save you. Without using any CSS or custom styles we’ve been able to design a nice-looking and fully functional web app in a short time.
