Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose

By : Thomas Künneth
Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose

By: Thomas Künneth

Overview of this book

Jetpack Compose is Android’s new framework for building fast, beautiful, and reliable native user interfaces. It simplifies and significantly accelerates UI development on Android using the declarative approach. This book will help developers to get hands-on with Jetpack Compose and adopt a modern way of building Android applications. The book is not an introduction to Android development, but it will build on your knowledge of how Android apps are developed. Complete with hands-on examples, this easy-to-follow guide will get you up to speed with the fundamentals of Jetpack Compose such as state hoisting, unidirectional data flow, and composition over inheritance and help you build your own Android apps using Compose. You'll also cover concepts such as testing, animation, and interoperability with the existing Android UI toolkit. By the end of the book, you'll be able to write your own Android apps using Jetpack Compose.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1:Fundamentals of Jetpack Compose
5
Part 2:Building User Interfaces
10
Part 3:Advanced Topics

Integrating toolbars and menus

Early Android versions did not know about action or app bars. They were introduced with API level 11 (Honeycomb). The options menu, on the other hand, has been around since the beginning but was opened by pressing a dedicated hardware button and shown at the bottom of the screen. With Android 3, it moved to the top and became a vertical list. Some elements could be made available permanently as actions. In a way, the options menu and the action bar merged. While originally, all the aspects of the action bar were handled by the hosting activity, the AppCompat support library introduced an alternative implementation (getSupportActionBar()). It is still widely used today as part of Jetpack.

Using Scaffold() to structure your screen

Jetpack Compose includes several app bar implementations that closely follow Material Design or Material You specifications. They can be added to a Compose UI through Scaffold(), a composable function that acts as an app...