I'm currently working on a tutorial series about the new "Material Design" and how to create such apps with B4A.
Now I'm thinking about the way to choose. Google gave us a quite good library for creating material design apps even for older android versions. It's the "AppCompat V7 Support Library". In this library there are many useful tools and components for creating material design apps in a backwards compatible way.
The drawback of this library is that it adds some overhead to the apps so a minimal app with appcompat v7 and material design will be 1MB in size. Also the handling will be a bit complicated (Using a special theme, extending special Activity class, using additional ressources, ...).
The other way would be not to use AppCompat but use some native SDK features of Android Lollipop (API21). The drawback of this method would be that the new features like Toolbar etc. will only be available on Android Lollipop (and up) devices. So the apps won't be backwards compatible to older Android versions.
With some work many things can be produced with the possiblities available directly with B4A but in my opinion this will produce only the "look" of material design, not the "feel".
So what do you think I should do in the tutorials? Should I concentrate mainly on features possible with AppCompat (of course I will create a nice wrapper library for AppCompat for your use) or should I mainly concentrate on features available directly in B4A and in the native API 21 SDK?
I added a poll to this post where you can give a quick answer. But please also write comments what you think about it.
P.S.: A first tutorial with a simple example in material design for Android 5.0 devices will come in a few days.
Now I'm thinking about the way to choose. Google gave us a quite good library for creating material design apps even for older android versions. It's the "AppCompat V7 Support Library". In this library there are many useful tools and components for creating material design apps in a backwards compatible way.
The drawback of this library is that it adds some overhead to the apps so a minimal app with appcompat v7 and material design will be 1MB in size. Also the handling will be a bit complicated (Using a special theme, extending special Activity class, using additional ressources, ...).
The other way would be not to use AppCompat but use some native SDK features of Android Lollipop (API21). The drawback of this method would be that the new features like Toolbar etc. will only be available on Android Lollipop (and up) devices. So the apps won't be backwards compatible to older Android versions.
With some work many things can be produced with the possiblities available directly with B4A but in my opinion this will produce only the "look" of material design, not the "feel".
So what do you think I should do in the tutorials? Should I concentrate mainly on features possible with AppCompat (of course I will create a nice wrapper library for AppCompat for your use) or should I mainly concentrate on features available directly in B4A and in the native API 21 SDK?
I added a poll to this post where you can give a quick answer. But please also write comments what you think about it.
P.S.: A first tutorial with a simple example in material design for Android 5.0 devices will come in a few days.
