AppBar – Part 2

The AppBar is an evolution of the ActionBar which provides us with a rich toolbox for defining and customising the behaviour. All apps will have different requirements for their AppBars and each app may have different AppBar implementations in different Activities. In this series, rather than look at the AppBar implementations themselves, we’re going to…

Curved Motion – Part 2

The Material design guidelines advocate the use of authentic motion and the Play Store app has (at the time of writing) recently had an update to provide curved motion when transitioning from a list into a detail view. In this short series we’ll look at how to implement curved motion.

Manual Layout Transitions – Part 4

Layout transitions are an important aspect of Material design as they help to indicate the user flow through an app, and help to tie visual components together as the user navigates. Two important tools for achieving this are Activity Transitions (which we’ll cover in the future) and Layout Transitions which we have covered on Styling…

Manual Layout Transitions – Part 3

Layout transitions are an important aspect of Material design as they help to indicate the user flow through an app, and help to tie visual components together as the user navigates. Two important tools for achieving this are Activity Transitions (which we’ll cover in the future) and Layout Transitions which we have covered on Styling…

Manual Layout Transitions – Part 2

Layout transitions are an important aspect of Material design as they help to indicate the user flow through an app, and help to tie visual components together as the user navigates. Two important tools for achieving this are Activity Transitions (which we’ll cover in the future) and Layout Transitions which we have covered on Styling…

Manual Layout Transitions – Part 1

Layout transitions are an important aspect of Material design as they help to indicate the user flow through an app, and help to tie visual components together as the user navigates. Two important tools for achieving this are Activity Transitions (which we’ll cover in the future) and Layout Transitions which we have covered on Styling…

App Polish

Often we complete the functional aspect of an Android project, and when it comes to adding some sparkle to the UI to really make it appealing to the user inspiration can be a little lacking. In this article we’ll start of with a really functional but boring app, and turn it in to something much…

Blurring Images – Part 7

In the previous article we performed some simple optimisations which enormously improved the frame rate of our animations. However, we mentioned that increasing the size of the area that we wish to blur will slow the frame rate because the complexity of the blur operation will increase exponentially. In this article we’ll look at an…

Blurring Images – Part 6

In the previous article we looked at frame rates, and explored how we can measure them by adding some simple benchmarking logging. In this article we’ll look at implementing our dynamic blurring so that we can animate things, and optimising things to improve our framerate.

Blurring Images – Part 5

So far in this series there have been quite a few mentions of frame rates, and assertions that we want to keep our frame rates as high as possible. In this article we’ll look a little closer at how we can measure frame rates, and explore how changes in our layouts and views can affect…