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)

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, as in the following screenshot:

To view each book's information, the user needs to move to each book's 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 screenshots:

This creates a very natural navigation experience, and is honestly 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...