Book Image

Learning Material Design

By : Kyle Mew, Nadir Belhaj
Book Image

Learning Material Design

By: Kyle Mew, Nadir Belhaj

Overview of this book

Google's Material Design language has taken the web development and design worlds by storm. Now available on many more platforms than Android, Material Design uses color, light, and movements to not only generate beautiful interfaces, but to provide intuitive navigation for the user. Learning Material Design will teach you the fundamental theories of Material Design using code samples to put these theories into practice. Focusing primarily on Android Studio, you’ll create mobile interfaces using the most widely used and powerful material components, such as sliding drawers and floating action buttons. Each section will introduce the relevant Java classes and APIs required to implement these components. With the rules regarding structure, layout, iconography, and typography covered, we then move into animation and transition, possibly Material Design's most powerful concept, allowing complex hierarchies to be displayed simply and stylishly. With all the basic technologies and concepts mastered, the book concludes by showing you how these skills can be applied to other platforms, in particular web apps, using the powerful Polymer library.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Drawer functionality


Many recent widgets and views are not viewable using Android Studio's preview or design modes, and although there are frequent updates to rectify these issues, there will always be times when the only way to view a layout is to run it on an emulator or device. As it stands, the code we have will not compile until we enter the Java code explained in the following two parts of the exercise. Firstly, we will connect our app bar, drawer, and navigation view, and secondly, we will see how to link navigation items to the rest of our apps. The chapter concludes with a look at alternative ways to implement sliding drawers.

Activating the navigation drawer

Once the following code has been entered, it will be possible to view and test your navigation bar:

  1. Open the MainActivity file and add the following lines in the onCreate() method to replace the action bar with our toolbar:

    toolbar = (Toolbar) findViewById(R.id.toolbar);
    setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
  2. Beneath this, add the following...