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.

Jim Wilson

$9.99 ~~$25.99~~

4.1 (10 Ratings)

eBook Sep 2013 122 pages 1st Edition

Jim Wilson

$9.99 ~~$25.99~~

4.1 (10 Ratings)

eBook Sep 2013 122 pages 1st Edition

What do you get with eBook?

Instant access to your Digital eBook purchase

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

View table of contents

Preview Book

Key benefits

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

Description

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.

Who is this book 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.

What you will learn

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

What do you get with eBook?

Instant access to your Digital eBook purchase

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

Frequently bought together

$43.99

Android NDK Beginner`s Guide - Second Edition

$54.99

$48.99

Total $ 147.97

Filter reviews by

All

Amazon verified reviews

Danny Preussler Nov 29, 2013

The concept of Fragments was introduced in Android Honeycomb. Although this feels like a very long time, it was in fact only 2 years ago. This new book attempts to summarise some of the last 2 years and what we (should) have learned.The book starts with an overview of when to use fragments (and also when not to) and introduces them using an example that we follow throughout the book. The example changes from a simple app into a more advanced one with landscape views, which is later migrated to tablets. This way it changes from a normal layout application into one with fragments.It not only explains resource folders, but also layout aliases mechanism. This is a great start for new developers.If you are already familiar with fragments you might want to skip the first part but should pay attention to the the part about lifecycle. It details exactly how lifecycle and associated methods of activities and fragment are bound. The book describes the important differences between onCreate() and onCreateView() especially when it comes to pausing views and what it means in terms of performance for the developer.The last part of the book covers actionbar navigation examples built with fragments as tabs or dropdown navigation. For me, this is the only negative point in the book -- nowadays most people use menu drawer for navigation, but this is completly missing in the book. It would have been great to see this compared to other modes and what you need to change in your app and how it effects your fragments.Altogether this is an important book. It's not a large book, just a few hundred pages, so a quick read and a quick win.

Amazon Verified review

Cong La Mar 15, 2016

This is a one of the best Android books I have had. Good examples and very clear explanations.

Fabio Radin Dec 09, 2013

The book by Jim Wilson is very clear and exhaustive about a powerfull technique of the most modern UI design approach for Android applications. The intention is really clear: to describe with a very detailed level the pros and cons of fragments approach, in contrast with activity based one. In addition to that, Jim explains all the fragments related stuff to create very effective Android UI...Divided in three parts, the first one is a simple but efficient comparison between the traditional way of programming UI for Android and the new one (introduced in Android Honeycomb, 3.0 version, when tablets starts to came out). The middle part covers the lifecycle of fragments inside the Android application (I really appreciate this one!), about two aspects: in the creation, setup, destruction and management of fragments inside the Android application and in the fragment transactions in the UI, in order to create rich UI navigation. In the end, the third part improves the ActionBar design and workflow.The required level to approach this book is more or less low: basic knowledge of Android programming and a working development environment for the examples.In summary, I found this book really helpful to introduce and make you a master in Android Fragment design and code writing.Note: This book was provided for review by Packt.

Amazon Customer Dec 19, 2013

Over the past few months I have been trying to expand my knowledge of Android development and this was a great supplement on the subject of Fragments.The in depth coverage of the topics were of a very high standard as I have come to expect of most Packt Publications.This is a must read for any serious Android developer

Shaju Mathew Dec 03, 2013

Well presented, succinct, hands-on how-to guide on how to leverage the fragments interface to create a responsive and portable Android UI that behaves as-designed on different form-factors, screen resolutions and operating mode. Unlike other Android/UI material that aspire to be a catch-all for all things ui, this book focuses exclusively on fragments, navigation mechanisms that take advantage of this API, how to promote code reuse and reduce APK footprint. Hard-to-understand concepts such as fragment lifecycle, loosely coupling user-interface segments, dynamic fragment loading, Actionbar integration, swipe navigation in gallery style, implementing tabs with fragments, etc are clearly explained by analyzing the application side-by-side, with and without employing these new functionality exposed by the Android SDK. Obviously, a fundamental understanding of mobile user-interface, Android lifecycle, layouts, are a requirement.

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.

What do you get with eBook?