Other Why not native support?

[sktanmoy]

Why not native support? Why we need to use a + b + c + ... + z just to get material design.
No support for popular libraries, even no official support for Google or Facebook SDK.
After using 3 years, I probably leave using B4A now.

 

[Erel]

Material design is supported. Just set targetSdkVersion to 21 and the material design will be used (on Android 5+). Make sure that the holo theme is not explicitly set.
Elevation which is an important feature of material design is also supported.

The problem with built-in support for more material-only features is that they are only natively supported on Android 5+.
Moving forward more and more features will be included internally.

There are many official Google libraries (AdMob, Maps and more). There are also many high quality non-official Google related libraries.

 

[Douglas Farias]

Why not native support? Why we need to use a + b + c + ... + z just to get material design.
No support for popular libraries, even no official support for Google or Facebook SDK.
After using 3 years, I probably leave using B4A now.

Material Design its easy to find on this forum, or you can make this alone easy.
and on social networks (facebook, twitter and google) I agree with you, easily find official tutorials and libraries for other platforms.

The @Erel cant make this (dont have time to make this libs and update all time).
but i think its time to (pay) a good developer to make the oficial lib to B4A,B4I(this would be a good investment).
This is good for the softwares and for the users.
(Facebook, Google and Twitter) = + users.

 

[migrec]

I dont really understand, you can still make material apps and not much is required.
Made this with around 50 lines of code (very simple and short lines)
It's just AppCompat, MSMaterialDrawer and DesignSupport, the awesome thing about this is that it will look material on older versions of Android aswell
I dont think implementing these libraries such as Appcompat is easier on any other IDE...

 

[ivan.tellez]

The problem with built-in support for more material-only features is that they are only natively supported on Android 5+.
Moving forward more and more features will be included internally.

Well, sktanmoy has a good point:

Why we need to use a + b + c + ... + z just to get material design.

He is talking about those projects that use the appcompat, and actualy it is a little pain in the ass all the setup required to use them.

I think the same as sktanmoy, B4A shoul provide support for more material design elements. Either using appcompat, or using something like you did in B4i with the iUI8.

But since the marketshare of Android 5+ is only 35%, appcompat sould be better.


migrec also has a valid point, "it can be done" after the setup, you ned extra 50 lines of code. But native support for app compat by B4A and its designer its not a bad idea.

 

[Erel]

Next version of B4A will include better support for custom views (like in the beta versions of B4J and B4i). It will make it easier to use additional UI libraries (assuming that the libraries will be updated).

 

[Cableguy]

For the first time EVER, b4J and b4i got beta before b4a... I wonder why?

 

[Erel]

For the first time EVER, b4J and b4i got beta before b4a

That's not true. The new IDE was first released with B4J. B4J was also the first to include the latest version of the debugger.

It is easier to implement new features in B4J and then port them to B4A and B4i.

 

[Cableguy]

Sorry, @Erek, i'm just eager to try the new custom view properties match