With the Android 12 beta now available, we’re starting to learn more about the new features that the latest version of Android gives to us. One of the things that caught my eye here is the introduction of a Splash Screen API – not only providing a standardised way for apps to present splash screens within their apps, but also improve the user experience when it comes to launching apps...
There was a lot of exciting news announced at Google I/O this week – one of the things I had been looking forward to was hearing about large screen experiences. While these devices and design principles have existed side-by-side for some time, it’s always felt like support for developers has never quite fully been accessible. However, with some of the announcements at I/O this week...
A large amount of mobile apps will need some form of Navigation, allowing users to move between different parts of an application. When implementing these requirements within Android Apps, applications have either rolled their own solutions, relied on traditional intents or the fragment manager, or explored the option of the Navigation Component over recent years. Throughout the alpha...
With the announcement of the first Android 12 Developer Preview announced yesterday, I started to take a dive into some of the API changes and the new things we’ll be getting our hands on. One of these things was the new unified rich content API, providing a simplified way of transferring media between applications. You may have previously used Image Keyboard Support when using or...
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 =...
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...
When interacting with apps on our devices, animations not only add delight to our experience but they also help to create a sense of connection between the destinations being animated. One of the animations on Android which I’ve always enjoyed is the exploding Floating Action Button animation. Here, the user clicks the FAB and it explodes to fill the whole screen, with the next screen being...
When it comes to developing Android applications, ensuring or applications remain stable is vital to providing a good user experience. One of things we can do to help achieve this is by writing automated tests that run checks against the user interface of our application. When it comes to Jetpack Compose, things currently look a little different to how we might be used to writing these kind of...
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...