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


Intentional screen management frees us from the burden of trying each application screen to an individual activity. Using the FragmentTransaction class, we're able to dynamically switch between individual fragments within an activity, eliminating the need to create a separate activity class for each screen in our application. This helps to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary activity classes, better organize our applications, and avoid the associated increase in complexity.

We'll see in the next chapter that this ability to dynamically manage multiple screens within a single activity opens us up to greater flexibility and an increased richness in the appearance and navigation behavior of our Android applications.