Android Material Design

Introduction

This article explores the Google Material Design concept and his history.

Focused on Android development, I will talk about issues and the hard work to implement this concept on old Android devices and show some important references about it.

History

In Google I/O 2014, Google launched a new concept of User Experience, the famous Material Design, which roughly speaking is a concept based on layers of paper with colors "plateaus" and transitions with stylish effects and closer to reality. Very efficient on mobile devices, but also developed to adapt to varying resolutions and in tablet's desktops.

The Google also launched a website (referenced in the link below) with the specifications of the material design with several guides conceptualizing the use of this new UX with examples of components, color palettes, among other features.

• https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html

To Android developers is natural developers get a few hours browsing the site of specs Material Design and spend days looking for ways to implement them in practice or beg for Google and GitHub find you some component that actually works, both in Lollipop version as in other older version, mainly because the KitKat and JellyBean versions account for more than 75% of the market dispositos running the Android platform.

In the session "Material Now" from Google I / O 2015, much has been said about these frustrations, research and adoption of Material Design, as well as new updates to Google's specifications and support for the Material Design on Android, from the new, as awaited Design Support Library.

Android Design Support Library

New components, concepts, transition effects and consequently some bug's were entered in this library.

TabLayout and Navigation Drawer deserve great attention, since implementing them within the material specs is extremely painful. FAB Button, snackbar and EditText (created within TextInputLayout) are components that, although simple, can be found in many third-party libraries.

Unfortunately, some bugs are already well known as FAB Button which is "stoned" on the Android L and TabLayout that sometimes "lock" a bit when trying to navigate between tabs.

I created a sample Android application, to show all the new features of the Design Support Library, in order to help the developer to meet these new features quickly and easily.

The application is available in a repository Github and can be seen at the following link:

• https://github.com/RichardSilveira/AndroidMaterialDesign