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)

Incorporating motion in fragment transitions


Incorporating meaningful motion is the central idea of material design. As developers, we're encouraged to use motion to enrich user experience, especially when the user moves from one screen to the next. To simplify incorporating motion in fragment transitions, the Fragment class includes features that greatly simplify animating the transition from one fragment to another.

Note

The fragment transition features we will cover in this chapter are available on the native Fragment class starting in API 21 and are available to earlier Android versions with the Fragment class in v4 of Android Support Library.

Let's first look at adding a simple motion of sliding the items from one fragment off the screen and sliding the items for the next fragment onto the screen.

Transitioning fragments on and off the screen

Android has supported animating views since the platform's initial release. The problem is that managing the details of animating individual views...