Blog

Material design is the new design language for Android and defines the visual, motion and interaction design across platforms and devices. Google has a material design specification that offers guidelines for using material design for app development on the platform. These can be used on Android 5.0 lollipop version on-wards. We discuss 6 elements of material design for Android apps development.

1. Material theme –

It is the interface style that establishes the look and feel of views and activities. This element is built into the Lollipop and is used by the system UI and applications. The user can dynamically set the system-wide appearance with this element from their Settings menu. There are 3 flavours of Material Theme :

• Theme.Material
• Theme.Material.Light
• Theme.Material.Light.DarkActionBar

2. Widgets for cards and lists-

There are two new widgets for displaying cards and lists:

• RecyclerView – with multiple layout options and supports high performance
• CardView – display information inside a card

3. Custom shadows and view clipping –

With custom shadows and view clipping, elevation of UI elements are introduced. Elevation determines the shadow cast by each view can can be set for layouts defined in DP for any view.

4. Vector drawables:

They are vector graphics the recipe for which is written in an XML format that can be executed with a series of draw commands. Their advantage is that they can be scaled without losing definition and only one asset file is required for each screen density.

5. Custom animations:

With material design, animation gives users feedback on actions and visual continuity to interact with the app. There is some default animation button and activity transitions which can be customized or new ones can be created. There are custom animation APIS for –

• Touch feedback
• Circular Reveal
• Activity transitions
• Curved motion
• View state changes
• State list drawables -Vector Drawables ,Colour extraction, Drawable tinting

6. APIs for custom shadows and animations:

Material Design has new APIS for custom design and shadows. You can use animation APIs to create custom animations for UI controls, changing view state and activity transition. The new APIs allow you to:

• Respond to touch events
• Hide and show views with circular reveal
• Add customized activity transition
• Create natural animations with curved motion
• Animate multiple view properties with view state change animations
• Add animations to state list drawables

We are excited about commencing android app development for Lollipop and Marshmallow using these cool features. Get in touch for your development needs too.