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 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 layout of child components inside of their parents, it is likely we’re going to want to arrange them in some way on both the horizontal and/or vertical axis. For example, our parent may fill the height of the screen, but our child components may only represent a small amount of that height and we may want to arrange that to be at the bottom of the screen. The same applies...
When it comes to building our UI in jetpack compose, for a lot of applications it will come at a time when our UIs are already build using a mixture of existing solutions – be it XML layouts or custom views. It may even be the case that we have custom views in our current Android project that aren’t quite ready to be converted over to compose just yet, or maybe it doesn’t feel very...
Outside of my working hours I have often spent time with other people involved in animal rights — be it volunteering for a local animal sanctuary, visiting shelters or planning with other animal rights groups. One thing I’ve noticed along this time is that the awareness of these groups has never been too accessible — I’ve only discovered them through chance or word of mouth, and having known of...
Firebase Hosting is a tool that provides us with a way to host web applications, allowing us to serve both static and dynamic content to our users with a simplified method of hosting. Whether it’s a web app, or a simple static landing page for a pre-launch of our product, we can deploy content to Firebase Hosting with a single command using the Firebase Command Line Interface. When we host our...
When building Flutter applications, we have the ability to create native components which are styled for the native experience on both Android and iOS. Whilst by default we may implement things in a material style, it is important to bear this native experience in mind. In the first set of these articles we will take a quick look at implementing tabbed navigation for the styling of both Android...
In a recent side-project of mine I needed to perform some simple loading of data from an external data source. This was all data that I had collated myself so I decided to manually load it up into Firestore — in this post we’re going to quickly take a look at how we can hook up our Flutter application to load data from a Firestore datastore to display to our users. This post will hopefully act as...
When distributing our Android Applications we’ve always been required to sign our APK using a keystore for our application — this has allowed us to ensure that only the developer(s) of our app are able to upload updated APKs to the play console. However, because this keystore acts as a fingerprint to the lifecycle of our application — if anything was to happen to this then we hit a bit of a...
If you haven’t check out the previous post in these series, then you can do so here: Building HashTrack with Flutter: Intro and setup Building HashTrack with Flutter: Main class and Localization setup You can also find the code for this guide here: Now that we have the foundations of our application built, we’re going to go ahead and setup the first screens which will be shown to the user when...