Book Image

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

By : Jim Wilson
Book Image

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

By: Jim Wilson

Overview of this book

To create a dynamic and multi-pane user interface on Android, you need to encapsulate UI components and activity behaviors into modules that you can swap into and out of your activities. You can create these modules with the fragment class, which behaves somewhat like a nested activity that can define its own layout and manage its own lifecycle. When a fragment specifies its own layout, it can be configured in different combinations with other fragments inside an activity to modify your layout configuration for different screen sizes (a small screen might show one fragment at a time, but a large screen can show two or more). Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments shows you how to create modern Android applications that meet the high expectations of today's users. You will learn how to incorporate rich navigation features like swipe-based screen browsing and how to create adaptive UIs that ensure your application looks fantastic whether run on a low cost smartphone or the latest tablet. This book looks at the impact fragments have on Android UI design and their role in both simplifying many common UI challenges and providing new ways to incorporate rich UI behaviors. You will learn how to use fragments to create UIs that automatically adapt to device differences. We look closely at the roll of fragment transactions and how to work with the Android back stack. Leveraging this understanding, we then explore several specialized fragment-related classes like ListFragment and DialogFragment as well as rich navigation features like swipe-based screen browsing.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Making navigation fun with swipe


Many applications involve several screens of data that a user might want to browse or flip through to view each screen. As an example, think of an application where we list a catalogue of books with each book in the catalogue appearing on a single screen. A book's screen contains an image, title, and description like the following screenshot:

To view each book's information, the user needs to move to each screen. We could put a next button and a previous button on the screen, but a more natural action is for the user to use their thumb or finger to swipe the screen from one edge of the display to the other and have the screen with the next book's information slide into place as represented in the following screenshot:

This creates a very natural navigation experience, and honestly, is a more fun way to navigate through an application than using buttons.

Implementing swipe navigation

Implementing swipe navigation is pretty simple, and fragments are at the core...