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 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...
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...
If you’re enjoying my posts on Jetpack Compose, check out some details on the book I’ll be writing on Compose! When it comes to laying out groups of components in our screens, it’s not always the case that we want them to be sequentially displayed in a vertical or horizontal manner. There may be times in which we want to have some items drawn behind and/or on top of others. When this is...
If you’re enjoying my posts on Jetpack Compose, check out some details on the book I’ll be writing on Compose! When it comes to decorating views within Jetpack Compose, some components allow the use of a Border reference to outline a given component. Currently, the use of a Border reference is not too extensive and requires minimal effort to get in place. There are currently two ways to...
In the last section we looked at the Radio Button, allowing us to create a single selectable item. However, defining a group of these would require a collection of boilerplate logic as we’d have to manually handle the state for the group of buttons. When it comes to this scenario, Jetpack Compose contains a Radio Group which can be used to create a collection of radio buttons for single selection...
If you’re enjoying my posts on Jetpack Compose, check out some details on the book I’ll be writing on Compose! We previously looked at other checkable components and how they can be used to allow a toggleable state controller within our user interface. Alongside these other toggleable components we also have the Radio Button component. This button allows our users to select some...
If you’re enjoying my posts on Jetpack Compose, check out some details on the book I’ll be writing on Compose! Snackbars provide us with a way to show short, non-blocking alerts to the user. Usually displayed at the bottom of the screen, these components can also provide a single action for the user to take in the context of the given message. Jetpack Compose provides us a minimal API...