Since the announcement of Jetpack Compose, followed by the developer and alpha releases of the framework, excitement has been building around getting this into our apps. With the migration to Compose, we will see huge improvements in developer productivity, application stability and maintainability, as well as other side affects in things such as hiring (who wouldn’t want to work on a team...
The ability to Preview Jetpack Compose composables within Android Studio is possibly one of my favorite things about this new way of building apps. Previews allow us to build, style and polish our composables without needing to run our app. The annotation offers a range of ways in which our previews can be configured, so I wanted to take a few moments to show you exactly what it can do so that we...
The Card composable is a surface that can be used to present content and actions focused on a single topic. If you’re enjoying my posts on Jetpack Compose, check out some details on the book I’m writing on Compose! When it comes to displaying a Card, there is a single composable function that can be used to do so. @Composable fun Card( modifier: Modifier = Modifier, shape: Shape =...
I’ve recently been having some conversations with developers from the community about GraphQL and how it is being used in their work, with the aim to influence some of the changes we are making in our stack at Buffer. During one of these chats with Maria Neumayer, there was some experience shared of designing GraphQL schemas to represent the presentation of screens in an app. This approach...
The Column Composable provides us with the functionality of displaying a collection of composables in a vertically sequenced format, where each composable is displayed simultaneously one after the other. If you’re enjoying my posts on Jetpack Compose, check out some details on the book I’m writing on Compose! When it comes to declaring a Column, there are four arguments which the...
When it comes to the composition of composables, we may want to apply additional spacing to a composables size constraints. For this we can utilise Padding – padding adds this additional space to the specified sides of the composable, essentially making it larger in size. This area of padding cannot be consumed by the content inside of the composable, instead it merely acts as additional...
When it comes to the Google Play store, app ratings and reviews are a pretty important marketing tool – they can have a huge influence on whether someone downloads our app, so ensuring that we do not miss out on good reviews is important. However, I’ve felt like there has always been a lot of friction in the review process – many apps seem to approach it differently, all of...
Learning a new way of doing something is a very powerful tool – not only does it open our eyes to new perspectives, but it has the potential to improve on a previous approach we may have taken to solving a problem. The more we learn, the more perspectives we have in place to creating a solution. With this set of approaches that can then be used, we will generally pick the one that feels...
When building applications, user privacy is shifting more and more to the core of development values throughout the ecosystem. Aligned with this, Android 11 brings in a collection of changes to help improve the approaches to the privacy of user data in our apps. Amongst these changes are the introduction of the new Data Access Auditing API, used to help developers become more aware of user data...
When presented with a question, it’s natural for us to want to help – sometimes this can be in the form of providing a solution to the problem. Someone asks a question, we provide the answer and they have a solution that unblocks them. Whilst that solves a problem and clears their path for the short term, there can be a missed opportunity for long term development – providing...