Android Tutorial Android 5.0 Information and Resource Thread

[thedesolatesoul]

It will be great if we could implement the parallax scrolling effect that is present throughout Lollipop. I had requested for a wrapper. Please take a look.

http://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/wrapper-for-parallaxeverywhere.49466/

Nobody is using these libraries in B4A. Atleast I havent seen any UX intense apps in B4A leads me to believe i would waste time in wrapping it when nobody is using it.

 

[Inman]

I understand. But if you want the complete the Material Design UI, you should have parallax scrolling for images. Google apps have it. In Play Store while in the app details screen, when you scroll down, you can see the top header image scrolling in parallax mode. In Wikipedia official app too you can see it.

So in short, if there is a big image header as mentioned in Google's material guidelines, it should scroll in parallax mode.

 

[RandomCoder]

No. For using the AppCompat library you have to extend the Activity from "ActionBarActivity" which can be done with the #Extends Attribute in B4A. Then you have to set Theme.AppCompat and you immediately have a Material theme and the ActionBar looks like a Material Design Actionbar (No AppIcon, round overflow dots).

For tinting UI components in pre 5.0 you will have to use AppCompat library (Extend ActionBarActivity and use Theme.AppCompat theme), set targetSdkVersion to 21 AND you have to use XML Layouts with standard components.
There is no tinting for components created with "new xxx" like "new EditText()". Only standard components directly added with LayoutInflater() method get tinted and only if you don't use your own Factory (like in Erels XmlLayoutBuilder library).
So we currently have no chance to get nice design in pre 5.0 with B4A for now if you want to use AppCompat. This is really bad.

Edit: Chris Banes said in a post on his blog that the internal components for Material Design are currently hidden because the implementation is unfinished and this may change in the future. But nobody knows when this "future" is. Then it should be possible to wrap these components in a B4A library to use them directly. But then it will be not so nice to use the B4A-Designer.

The ToolBar is really nice and simple. It is like a B4A Panel with additional support for actions and overflow menu. I think I can show an example next week. You can add everything you want to it like Tabs or a Spinner.

Sorry to be reviving an old thread but I'm a little confused and could do with some clarification regarding Material Design.

The AppCompat library is to allow older Android versions to use some of the newer Material Design features, thus allowing backwards compatability, this I understand. BUT if wanting to develop only for SDK versions 21 and above (looking into the future) then AppCompat is not required. However have I understood correctly that the only way to use the new features of Material Design within a B4A project is to use the AppCompat library?

I'm using the Toolbar at the moment which I prefer over the stdActionBar but want to make sure that currently the only way of using this is to reference the AppCompat library? What is the feeling regarding these new features becoming a core part of B4A in its next release?

 

[corwin42]

Yes, you are correct. There is currently no wrapper library for the native ToolBar, only for the AppCompat version.

I don't think that it makes much sense for now to add API21+ features to B4A. API 21 is available on 3% of the devices for now. Yes, it will grow but like with the other Android versions we can expect API21 to be on most devices in about 2 years. Even Google says AppCompat is the way to go.

 

[RandomCoder]

@corwin42 thanks for the clarification, there's so much information it's often difficult for me to know for sure if I'm doing the right thing or not.

And once again, thanks the the excellent tutorials. They really were appreciated!

 

[Inman]

Google has updated Material Design guidelines with new sections

http://www.google.com/design/spec/whats-new/whats-new.html

 

[corwin42]

Uh, big update to the support library. They did a small step in version number from 22.0 to 22.1 but the changelog is HUGE.

Seems that I have to do a bigger update to the AppCompat library and need to change the tutorials. Much work to do. But there are some features that will make wrapping the Material Design Spinner possible.

 

[thedesolatesoul]

Yes, they added some new views didnt they. Does this mean we do not have to resort to the re-inflate view? We can just extend for e.g. AppCompatEditText in the same way as Erel extends EditText.
Another interesting point is the AlertDialog compat builder.
It really annoys me that they take 8 months to deliver this with no roadmap or expectations so most developers devise their own solutions.

 

[imbault]

All those new things, and they are a lot, impressive, Google wants to add elegant design in Android, that's very good.
@Erel , is B4A (in the future) will be compliant with material design and all these new controls, views etc....????
That the big question

Patrick

 

[thedesolatesoul]

@corwin42 : This explanation is so much better than the support library changelist: https://chris.banes.me/2015/04/22/support-libraries-v22-1-0/