jetc.dev Newsletter Issue #11

Published: 2020-04-28

Images! RadioGroups! And… the desktop?!? —

One Off the Stack, One Off the Slack

You’ve got questions. That’s understandable!

How do I load url into Image into DrawImage?

A common question with Compose is how to handle images from network sources. One answer on this question shows a loadPicture() function that uses Glide and lets you know when the image is done loading.

Centering Complications

In this Slack thread, we explore the changing ways of centering text (or other content) within a container.

Composable Commentary

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

Jetpack Compose… on the Desktop

A Gerrit update for Compose shows the beginnings of support for Compose for building desktop apps. This post explores how this is working and where it might be going.

Exploring Jetpack Compose: RadioGroup

Joe Birch follows up last week’s RadioButton article with a corresponding one for RadioGroup.

Jetpack Compose: Theme and Typography

Alex Zhukovich explores how Compose apps are expected to manage color schemes, font selections, and the like.

Building UI with Compose

Here, Elif Boncuk reviews the basics of implementing Compose, for newcomers to the subject.

Jetpack Compose: Twitter UI

Ahmed Rizwan is back, this time with a port of a Flutter-based Twitter UI to Jetpack Compose and Kotlin.

Resource Roundup

100% pure code!

GitHub - ahmedrizwan/JetpackComposeTwitter

This repo holds Ahmed Rizwan’s Twitter UI example mentioned above!

…And One More Thing

The Compose team has made no secret of the fact that Compose itself is fairly independent of Android. This week’s discovery of a nascent Compose-on-the-desktop project just underscores the point.

It will be interesting to see who comes up with other uses for Compose. That could be supporting other platforms (Web? Fuchsia? something new?). That could be supporting composition for things beyond the UI.

The biggest risk is change. We have no formal documentation or specification around Compose, nor do we have any formal API for what Compose expects from a platform. Clearly, these are early days, and so some of that might come with time. But it would be easier for a Google engineer to play with Compose for another platform than it would be for you or I to do the same. If Google wants this sort of experimentation by third parties, hopefully they will formalize how this works, so third parties know what is stable/supported and what is not.