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

Laying Out UI Elements in Compose

In the previous chapters, you learned how to build simple UIs. Although they consisted of just a few UI elements, they needed to arrange their buttons, text fields, and sliders in a particular order, direction, or hierarchy. Layouts position and size their content in a way specific to this layout, such as horizontally (Row()) or vertically (Column()). This chapter explores layouts in greater detail.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using predefined layouts
  • Understanding the single measure pass
  • Creating custom layouts

We will start by exploring the predefined layouts of Row(), Column(), and Box(). You will learn how to combine them to create beautiful UIs. Next, I’ll introduce you to ConstraintLayout. It places composables that are relative to others on the screen and uses attributes to flatten the UI element hierarchy. This is an alternative to nesting Row(), Column(), and Box().

The second main...