jetc.dev Newsletter Issue #2

Published: 2020-02-26

dev05 is here! And with it, we get our usual round of “hey, where did this move to?” and “what is the replacement for that?” sorts of questions. A fast-moving API means a quickly-obsolete set of existing resources.

But, that’s not going to stop us from trying!

Beyond that, we have routing, nav drawers, and Pokémon.

One Off the Stack, One Off the Slack

You’ve got questions. That’s understandable!

Using createComposeRule()

Google’s Ryan Mentley offers a quick tip for writing tests using createComposeRule(): adding android.app.Activity as an activity in your manifest.

Router vs. Navigation Component

In this Slack thread, Leland Richardson and Zsolt Kocsi debate how we might move from screen to screen within a Compose app.

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

Composable Commentary

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

Compose dev05 Release Notes

With each Compose update, we get a short list of release notes, along with links to corresponding commits in the repo.

Compose UI dev05 Release Notes

Similarly, we get release notes for the androidx.ui library, which represents most of the API surface that we as Compose users wind up touching.

Exploring Jetpack Compose: Modal Drawer Layout

Joe Birch continues his blog post series on Compose, this time looking at implementing navigation-style drawers.

Resource Roundup

100% pure code!

GitHub - Meshtastic companion app

Kevin Hester’s Android companion application for the Meshtastic ski/hike/fly/Signal-chat GPS radio

GitHub - Pokedex on Jetpack Compose

Zsolt Kocsi’s implementation of a Pokedex using Jetpack Compose

…And One More Thing

With each dev release, we need to make some adjustments to our Gradle scripts to adopt it. The obvious one is to update all of the Compose-related dependencies. But, in addition:

• Make sure that you set the kotlinCompilerExtensionVersion value in the composeOptions closure to the same version that you are using for your dependencies.

• Double-check the kotlinCompilerVersion to see if it has changed from the 1.3.61-dev-withExperimentalGoogleExtensions-20200129 value that we are using today.