Creating Dynamic Ui With Android Fragments

Make your Android apps a superior, silky-smooth experience for the end-user with this comprehensive guide to creating a dynamic and multi-pane UI. Everything you need to know in one handy volume.

Overview

• Learn everything you need to know to provide dynamic multi-screen UIs within a single activity
• Integrate the rich UI features demanded by today’s mobile users
• Understand the basics of using fragments and how to use them to create more adaptive and dynamic user experiences

In Detail

To create a dynamic and multi-pane user interface on Android, you need to encapsulate UI components and activity behaviors into modules that you can swap into and out of your activities. You can create these modules with the fragment class, which behaves somewhat like a nested activity that can define its own layout and manage its own lifecycle. When a fragment specifies its own layout, it can be configured in different combinations with other fragments inside an activity to modify your layout configuration for different screen sizes (a small screen might show one fragment at a time, but a large screen can show two or more).

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments shows you how to create modern Android applications that meet the high expectations of today’s users. You will learn how to incorporate rich navigation features like swipe-based screen browsing and how to create adaptive UIs that ensure your application looks fantastic whether run on a low cost smartphone or the latest tablet.

This book looks at the impact fragments have on Android UI design and their role in both simplifying many common UI challenges and providing new ways to incorporate rich UI behaviors.

You will learn how to use fragments to create UIs that automatically adapt to device differences. We look closely at the roll of fragment transactions and how to work with the Android back stack. Leveraging this understanding, we then explore several specialized fragment-related classes like ListFragment and DialogFragment as well as rich navigation features like swipe-based screen browsing.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand the role and capabilities of fragments
• Explore the fragment-oriented features of Android Studio
• Create an app UI that works effectively on smartphones and tablets
• Use fragments to create engaging navigation capabilities like swipe-based screen browsing
• Work with special purpose fragment classes like ListFragment and DialogFragment
• Dynamically manage fragments using the FragmentTransaction class
• Learn appropriate application design for communicating between fragments
• Efficiently handle fragment creation and lifecycle
• Simplify cross-thread UI handling with fragments
• Form multi-screen UIs that run within a single activity

Approach

A fast-paced tutorial that guides you through everything you need to know about dynamic UI design for Android devices.

Who this book is written for

This book is for developers with a basic understanding of Android programming who would like to improve the appearance and usability of their applications. Whether you’re looking to create a more interactive user experience, create more dynamically adaptive UIs, provide better support for tablets and smartphones in a single app, reduce the complexity of managing your app UIs, or you are just trying to expand your UI design philosophy, then this book is for you.

Jim Wilson

Jim Wilson is president of JW Hedgehog, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in solutions for the Android, iOS, and Microsoft platforms. Jim has nearly 30 years of software engineering experience, with the past 13 years heavily focused on creating mobile device and location-based solutions. After nearly a decade as a Microsoft Device Application Development MVP, Jim now focuses on developing Android and iOS device applications.

Jim's passion is teaching and mentoring software developers. He is a regular contributor of Android-related training materials to Pluralsight (http://training.jwhh.com), a leading provider of online developer training. Jim has authored more than 30 articles on device application development, and has developed mobility and smart client curriculums for several organizations. You can find Jim speaking at a variety of industry conferences, including AnDevCon, Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Tech Ed, VS Live, Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference, and many others.

Jim and his wife, along with several cats, live in Celebration, Florida (just 3 miles from Walt Disney World). Check out Jim's blog (http://blog.jwhh.com) where he talks about a variety of mobile software development issues as well as the fun of life just 3 miles from the "House of Mouse".

You can reach Jim at androidtraining@jwhh.com.