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)

Converting our application to use material design


Throughout this chapter, we'll work with the version of our Android Books app that we completed in Chapter 4, Working with Fragment Transactions. As you'll recall, this is the version of our app that shows a list of books on one fragment, allows the user to select a book from this list, and then shows the detail for the selected book on another fragment. To refresh your memory, the app appears as shown in the following screenshot:

At the completion of this chapter, the app will have an appearance and behavior consistent with material design and will look similar to the following screenshot:

This updated version of the app clearly has a more engaging appearance than the prior version. Each book shown in the list on the left-hand side has a rich graphical appearance and uses shadowing to give the appearance of being placed on a card that is layered above the screen. When a user selects a book, the app transitions to the screen on the right-hand...