Feb 18, 2020

jetc.dev Newsletter - Issue #1

By Mark Murphy, CommonsWare • Issue #1 • View online

Welcome! This weekly newsletter will focus on Jetpack Compose, the up-and-coming UI system for Android app developers. I will try to provide you with a steady stream of information about Compose, culled from the ever-growing stream of posts, comments, repositories, and other sources of Compose knowledge.

This week, we’ll look at lists and tables, plus Room and animations.

If you like what you find, forward the newsletter to a friend, or just send them to the jetc.dev site!

One Off the Stack, One Off the Slack

You’ve got questions. That’s understandable!

Jetpack Compose and Android Room compatibility

Getting Compose and other libraries working together can be a bit tricky in these early developer previews, due to limitations in the magic Kotlin bits that Google has created to make Compose work.

stackoverflow.com • Share

Enabling/Disabling Components in Compose

We can enable and disable a view with a simple function call. The equivalent in Compose right now is… complicated.

Note: to view this, you need to be a member of the Kotlin Slack workspace – sign up at https://slack.kotlinlang.org/!

kotlinlang.slack.com • Share

Composable Commentary

Posts, videos, and other new information related to Jetpack Compose!

Jetpack Compose: Data Tables

DataTables guidelines were introduced on material.io about a year ago. It is currently available for developers on Material Components for Web and Flutter but not available for Android and iOS, yet…

proandroiddev.com • Share

Intro to animations with Jetpack Compose

Earlier on, I got inspired by the Kotlin-Pokedex project and its Flutter counterpart: flutter_pokedex, and started experimenting with a Compose-based solution for it, out of which compose-pokedex…

proandroiddev.com • Share

Resource Roundup

100% pure code!

GitHub - Foso/Jetpack-Compose-Playground: Collection of Jetpack Compose example code

Collection of Jetpack Compose example code :rocket: - Foso/Jetpack-Compose-Playground

github.com • Share

Demo of AdapterList

Jetpack Compose now has an AdapterList composable, for a vertically-scrolling list, where off-screen elements do not get rendered.

android-review.googlesource.com • Share

...And One More Thing

So, is Jetpack Compose “for realz”?

You might guess that my answer is “yes”, given that I am starting a newsletter on the subject. 😁

Partly, that is due to competitive pressures. Apple is pursuing SwiftUI, a similar sort of reactive declarative UI framework. Google will want to keep pace.

Partly, that is due to the fact that this is an independent effort, not tied to other Google teams. For example, 2018’s hype feature for Android 9 was “slices”. But slices never amounted to much, because the “killer app” for them was supposed to be Google Search. When Search stopped emphasizing slices, interest in this technology dried up. Compose does not need some other Google product in order to be a success.

So, I’m fairly convinced that Compose will be a significant player for Android UI development in 2021 and beyond.

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Mark Murphy, CommonsWare

Jetpack Compose news and notes.

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