Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

By : Thomas Künneth
5 (1)
Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Thomas Künneth

Overview of this book

Compose has caused a paradigm shift in Android development, introducing a variety of new concepts that are essential to an Android developer’s learning journey. It solves a lot of pain points associated with Android development and is touted to become the default way to building Android apps over the next few years. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect all changes and additions that were made by Google since the initial stable release, and all examples are based on Material 3 (also called Material You). This book uses practical examples to help you understand the fundamental concepts of Jetpack Compose and how to use them when you are building your own Android applications. You’ll begin by getting an in-depth explanation of the declarative approach, along with its differences from and advantages over traditional user interface (UI) frameworks. Having laid this foundation, the next set of chapters take a practical approach to show you how to write your first composable function. The chapters will also help you master layouts, an important core component of every UI framework, and then move to more advanced topics such as animation, testing, and architectural best practices. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to write your own Android apps using Jetpack Compose and Material Design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals of Jetpack Compose
5
Part 2: Building User Interfaces
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Bringing Your Compose UI to Different Platforms

In Chapter 11, Developing for Different Form Factors, you learned how to use Window Size Classes, Jetpack WindowManager, and Canonical Layouts to make sure your app looks great on smartphones, tablets, and foldables. We investigated screen sizes, form factors, and hardware features, and understood how they influence app layout. You also learned that Window Size Classes help structure your user interface (UI). Knowing the generalized size of your app window is crucial for finding just the right layout. What just the right layout means depends on the purpose of your app. List-detail, Feed, and Supporting panes are great starting points for building the perfect UI. We closed Chapter 11 by discussing the anatomy of these so-called canonical layouts and learned when they are best used.

In this final chapter, I will show you how to bring your Jetpack Compose knowledge to systems other than Android—for example, the desktop (Windows...