#AskPolymer: How do you make the show? -- Polycasts #29

Key Takeaways

take two hey there pters Rob here welcome back to ask polymer the show where you send in your hashtagged questions and we do our best to answer them on air So today we're going to lead off with a question that a lot of people have asked which is how do you get your hand to show up in the screencast that you record so it's a really great question we've actually got a pretty elaborate rig that we've built that allows us to do this we've got a camera mounted above a Wacom cintique tablet and then we use a free program called omnid Dazzle that lets us draw on the screen we do all of our screen casting in Camtasia and we take all of that and we throw it in into a big keynote deck we just walk through that and record the whole thing mash it together and post so it's a it's a pretty cool setup uh and allows us to do that really awesome effect all right our next question comes from Jay who asks does polymer play nice with typescript and are there official type definitions for polymer so great question Jay uh there are not official definitions that have been created by the polymer team however the definitely typed repo on GitHub does have polymer definitions which you can use to get up and running with typescript and polymer in your project I've used them a little bit in U kind of an angular 2 experiment that I did so you can use those they're they're they're not fully featured if you will but they will get you started rolling with typescript and polymer so thank you Jay for sending in that question all right our next question comes from Thomas who asks how do I go about including a thirdparty library in my Polymer elements so good question there Thomas uh what I would recommend is creating an HTML import that contains the script tag for that thirdparty library and then your elements can depend on that import so you can see an example of this right over here from this uh chartjs element set that I created there's an import for chartjs everybody else depends on that so hopefully in the future authors just vend those Imports for us but today that's the workaround that we recommend and and I should add the reason we do that is so you can have multiple elements depending on that thing and HTML Imports will just D duplicate it for you so great question uh Thomas thank you for sending that in all right our next question comes from Wheatley who asks uh what would be the suggested way to do routing in a polymer application excellent question wheatle uh what I would recommend is you go check out our previous episode on using page JS that is actually how I've been doing it in my applications uh we also did an episode on an element called more in but it's a little not so wellmaintained these days so I'd recommend sticking with PJs also if you're interested you can check out over here this uh thing that we've been working on on GitHub called Web component shards so that actually allows you to take your your element bundles and break them up into pieces and maybe lazy load them this is still very experimental but uh this might be our long-term solution to allowing you to Lazy load stuff with your router so uh thank you so much wheatle for sending in that awesome awesome question all right our last question comes from Paul who asks are there plans to add paper elements for date and time Pickers great question Paul uh we want to make sure that before we go and create new elements that we've got our current paper elements as buttoned up as possible so that means you know fixing bugs on them making sure that they're really polished the apis do everything everybody wants so there's no near-term plans to add those extra elements cuz we want to focus on the set that we currently have however having said that there are community members who have created their own implementations of both of these so you can check out a date picker here and a Time picker over here those are also available on customelements.io so you can browse through uh some of the elements on that site so yeah maybe go try those out and they might meet your needs uh thank you so much for that really awesome question Paul so that's it for today thanks to everyone who send in questions if you out there have questions you want us to answer you can ping us on a social network of your choosing at # askpolymer as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time I'm kpack that's a w