Material Design

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 mobile 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 app development

1. Material theme2. Widgets for cards and lists3. Custom shadows and view clipping4. Vector drawables5. Custom animations6. APIs for custom shadows and animations

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

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

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.

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.

Custom animations

Curved motion

View state changes

State list drawables -Vector Drawables ,Colour extraction, Drawable tinting

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

CTouch feedback

Circular Reveal

Activity transitionslick to add Text

APIs for custom shadows and animations

Respond to touch events

Hide and show views with circular reveal

Animate multiple view properties with view state change animations

Create natural animations with curved motion

Add customized activity transition

Add animations to state list drawables

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:

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