jetc.dev Newsletter Issue #336

Published: 2026-10-27

This week, we see what nextapp devCon 2026 had on Compose. We explore blur effects and how to write a large-document text editing composable. Plus, we see how to get composables running on embedded hardware, beyond the phones/tablets/browsers/TVs/watches that it already supports.

nextapp devCon 2026

nextapp devCon 2026 had many presentations, including these with a strong Compose element:

Composable Commentary

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

Morphing a Floating Action Button into a Dialog in Compose Multiplatform

Joe Birch (Mastodon) has a post that “does what its says on the tin”: it demonstrates an animated effect to convert a FAB into a modal, to help better connect the two UI elements. The animation includes translation and resizing, along with cross-fading the content.

Medium: Implementing Uniform and Progressive Blur Effects in Jetpack Compose Using Modifier.blur

Irsath Kareem writes about surface blurs using the blur() modifier, including uniform and progressive blurs, BlurScope and BlurStops, and edge clipping.

Why BasicTextField Fails at Scale — And How I Build Kortex

numq explains the rationale and engineering behind Kortex, a composable text editor designed for large documents, supporting all major Compose Multiplatform targets. BasicTextField() and things built atop it are find for short text, but you need a much more elaborate solution for, say, and IDE-style code editor.

Resource Roundup

100% pure code!

GitHub: kaiwalyakhasnis / embedded-compose

GitHub user kaiwalyakhasnis is working on a Compose Native form of packaging Compose-based UIs that avoids the JVM and Skia entirely, with embedded systems as a target. For example, it can render to an LED board from a Raspberry Pi 3.

GitHub: halilozel1903 / compose-image-compare

Halil Özel created a before-and-after composable for comparing two images: the original and one with effects applied to it. The user can adjust a divider to control how much of each to see.

GitHub: dev-weiqi / cmp-remove-unused-resources-plugin

GitHub user dev-weiqi brings us a Gradle plugin to find and remove any Compose Multiplatform resources that appear to be unused. It includes a few options for describing an exclusion set, for resources that the plugin might think are unused by in truth are used.

A Very Particular Set of Skills

Adding Compose capabilities to your coding agents!

There was a bit more attention paid to LLM-centric tooling this week:

Layout-debug-mcp helps agents examine Web and Android UI and make changes
oh-my-android includes an MCP server to help agents interact with phones and emulators
tokens includes an MCP server to help your agent browse your design system tokens

Also, a few more sets of skills showed up:

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