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)

Material design


Material design is a design guide from Google for creating visually appealing applications that incorporate a very colorful graphical appearance and rich animated user experience. The material design guidelines are not specific to mobile but rather serve as a single set of ideas to design rich and highly interactive user experiences across mobile, web-based, and desktop apps.

The overall topic of material design is a complex subject that is outside the scope of this book. In this chapter, we will touch on a few general issues of material design; however, our focus is on those aspects of material design that are specific to Android fragments.

Note

Google provides several online resources that are helpful in learning more about working with material design. For a high-level look at material design, refer to http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design. To dig deeper into the aspects of material design that are specific to Android, take a look at http://developer.android.com...