Book Image

Creating Dynamic UIs with Android Fragments - Second Edition

By : Jim Wilson
Book Image

Creating Dynamic UIs with Android Fragments - Second Edition

By: Jim Wilson

Overview of this book

Today’s users expect mobile apps to be dynamic and highly interactive, with rich navigation features. These same apps must look fantastic whether running on a medium-resolution smartphone or high-resolution tablet. Fragments provide the toolset we need to meet these user expectations by enabling us to build our applications out of adaptable components that take advantage of the rich capabilities of each individual device and automatically adapt to their differences. This book looks at the impact fragments have on Android UI design and their role in both simplifying many common UI challenges and in providing best practices for incorporating rich UI behaviors. We look closely at the roll of fragment transactions and how to work with the Android back stack. Leveraging this understanding, we explore several specialized fragment-related classes such as ListFragment and DialogFragment. We then go on to discuss how to implement rich navigation features such as swipe-based screen browsing, and the role of fragments when developing applications that take advantage of the latest aspects of Material Design. You will learn everything you need to provide dynamic, multi-screen UIs within a single activity, and the rich UI features demanded by today’s mobile users.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


The shift from the old thinking of being activity-oriented to the new thinking of being fragment-oriented opens up our applications to rich possibilities. Fragments allow us to better organize both the appearance of the user interface and the code we use to manage it. With fragments, our application user interface has a more modular approach that frees us from being tied to the specific capabilities of a small set of devices and prepares us to work with the rich devices of today and the wide variety of new devices to come tomorrow.

In the next chapter, we'll build on the modularized user interface we created with fragments to enable our application to automatically adapt to the differences in various device form factors with only minimal changes to our application.