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Learning Material Design
Learning Material Design

Learning Material Design: Master Material Design and create beautiful, animated interfaces for mobile and web applications

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Learning Material Design

Chapter 2. Building a Mobile Layout

Having set up Android Studio and SDK, along with real and virtual devices for testing on, and having had a brief look at one of the application templates provided by Android Studio, we are now in a position to take a more detailed look at how Android layouts are constructed, and how support libraries are used to create material layouts for older versions of Android.

There are several built-in layout formats provided with the SDK, and more available from the support libraries. As these layouts can be nested within one another, it is possible to put together almost any imaginable screen structure. This chapter will outline how screen components can be scaled, proportioned, and aligned, as well as how resources such as images and text are kept separate from layout definitions, and how this simplifies such things as translation. Although the content of this chapter is essential for creating material layouts, it does largely apply to all Android layouts...

Activities and layouts

Android applications are are made up of one or more screens called activities. So as to keep design and function separate, the appearance of an activity is defined in XML, and its behavior with Java. Creating an Android Studio project using the Blank Activity template is a good way to see how this works.

XML activities contain two types of screen components. There are all the visible screen objects, called widgets, that we associate with mobile apps, such as buttons, sliders, and images, and there are invisible container objects known as layouts or ViewGroups. If you open the activity_main.xml XML file that was created by the project template, in design mode, you will see that there are seven layouts available to us at the top of the palette.

Activities and layouts

RelativeLayouts

On the right-hand side of the editor is the component tree; this displays a hierarchical view of the activity, and we can see that the root layout here is a RelativeLayout, and that it contains a single widget,...

Applying material to older devices

The support repository we downloaded in the last chapter provides code that allows us to apply our designs on handsets going all the way back to Android 1.8, although the further back you go, the fewer features are supported. For the purpose of this book, we will make our applications backwards compatible as far back as API 16.

To achieve this, we will be using code provided by the AppCompat support library; in doing so, we will encounter one of the most significant material components: the Toolbar, which replaced the previous, less flexible Action Bar.

In older versions of Android, unless switched off, the Action Bar would sit at the top of each app and could contain our title along with any of the option menu items we chose, which were expressed as text, icons, or both. It was not really considered a true part of the UI, but rather an element that sat outside our design.

The new toolbar, although often acting as our app's action bar, is far more flexible...

Summary

A lot of this chapter has not been about Material Design specifically, but we needed to cover this ground to see how Android activities are designed, and how material can be made available to a wider range of devices. This knowledge now enables us to delve deeper into the rules of Material Design that cover color, proportion, and movement.

In the next chapter, we will take this a step further and explore some of the most commonly used material components, including menus, dialogs, and toolbars. We will also see how to include click-listener callback methods that will allow us to respond programmatically to user actions.

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Key benefits

  • Master the highly acclaimed Material Design paradigm and give your apps and pages the look that everyone is talking about
  • Get a mix of key theoretical concepts combined with enough practical examples to put each theory into practice so you can create elegant material interfaces with Android Studio and Polymer
  • Written by Kyle Mew, successful author with over a decade of mobile and web development experience, this book has both the touch of a developer as well as an experienced writer

Description

Google's Material Design language has taken the web development and design worlds by storm. Now available on many more platforms than Android, Material Design uses color, light, and movements to not only generate beautiful interfaces, but to provide intuitive navigation for the user. Learning Material Design will teach you the fundamental theories of Material Design using code samples to put these theories into practice. Focusing primarily on Android Studio, you’ll create mobile interfaces using the most widely used and powerful material components, such as sliding drawers and floating action buttons. Each section will introduce the relevant Java classes and APIs required to implement these components. With the rules regarding structure, layout, iconography, and typography covered, we then move into animation and transition, possibly Material Design's most powerful concept, allowing complex hierarchies to be displayed simply and stylishly. With all the basic technologies and concepts mastered, the book concludes by showing you how these skills can be applied to other platforms, in particular web apps, using the powerful Polymer library.

Who is this book for?

This book is ideal for web developers and designers who are interested in implementing Material Design in their mobile and web apps. No prior knowledge or experience of Material Design is required, but some familiarity with procedural languages such as Java and markup languages such as HTML will provide an advantage.

What you will learn

  • Implement Material Design on both mobile and web platforms that work on older handsets and browsers
  • Design stylish layouts with the Material Theme
  • Create and manage cards, lists, and grids
  • Design and implement sliding drawers for seamless navigation
  • Coordinate components to work together
  • Animate widgets and create transitions and animation program flow
  • Use Polymer to bring Material Design to your web pages

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Dec 29, 2015
Length: 186 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785288715
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

What do you get with eBook?

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Product Details

Publication date : Dec 29, 2015
Length: 186 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785288715
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Getting Started with Material Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Building a Mobile Layout Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Common Components Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Sliding Drawers and Navigation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Lists, Cards, and Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Animations and Transitions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Material on Other Devices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Material Web Frameworks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. The Materialize Framework Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Material Design Lite Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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(1 Ratings)
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2 star 100%
1 star 0%
Gary Jan 18, 2021
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
My biggest problem with material is trying to figure out how to use it. The documentation is incomplete so I had hoped this book would help me learn some of the basics of Material. And it surely would have. If I were developing for Android. But I am not. Yes, the book skims over other platforms...but I need a deep dive, not a brief tour.If I were an Android developer I would love this book.
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