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UI libs

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Must-have libraries in modern Android developer toolbox. Android is a platform that for better or for worse runs on wide variety of devices and causes a lot of “fragmentation” complaints by less experienced developers. And while the screen/resolution issues can be decently solved by having a competent designer (see: web development), version fragmentation poses a more significant problem – only 7.1% of all Android devices run 4.x versions, while the rest are suck on older Androids with little hope for update. Ice Cream sandwich (and Honeycomb before it) brought significant improvements to the Android API, which significantly ease cross-device development and thanks to efforts of several developers a large part of those changes were backported in form of libraries for Android 2.x.

The most headache-easing libraries for Android development I’ve found so far are: 1. Android Support Package This is official Google library which backports Fragments an Loaders. 2. ABS is a library by Jake Wharton that backports the Action bar API to Android 2.x. 3. 4. Android Recipe #3, sliding menu, layers and filters. This third recipe is a new take on the popular sliding menu. You can find sliding menus in many applications including Path, Evernote, Falcon Pro, Google+, etc. Very often the sliding menu is just that, a simple sliding menu.

Some applications go a little farther and add a dimming effect: when you open the menu, the menu is slowly revealed by fading out a black layer. All the implementations I’ve seen, the SlidingMenu library for instance, simply draw a translucent rectangle on top of the menu. This is not only expensive because it causes overdraw but it’s also fairly limited. Today’s demo uses a different effect. If you cannot (or don’t want to) run the demo application you can see what the effect looks like in motion in this video. To implement this effect you must first enable hardware layers on your views. When a hardware layer is set on a View, that View is rendered into an OpenGL texture every time it updates. If (layerType ! The blending modeThe opacityThe color filter. Jfeinstein10/SlidingMenu. Emerging UI Pattern - Side Navigation. Android UI has been improving with a phenomenal speed in the last year (I composed a small gallery of some apps I really like in Google+).

Many of the changes has been only cosmetic (holo theme, Roboto font, etc). We haven't seen large changes in the way user interfaces are designed beyond that. We might have one such change happening now though. The facebook's side navigation was recently picked up by few apps nearly simultaneously. The implementation in each of the apps is very different. The visual differences of the implementations are very apparent. There was a interesting discussion about this pattern in the blog's Google+ page some time ago. Dashboard is dead(ish) The side navigation replaces the much criticized dashboard pattern in the apps. The Dashboard also requires users to come back to the app's home screen to navigate to other parts of the app. This example demonstrates the difficulty of navigating between app sections in a dashboard app.

Side navigation problems Up? Future. Android Facebook style slide. Android facebook style slide.