jetc.dev Newsletter Issue #150

Published: 2023-01-24

This week, we look at borders and locales. We examine previews and paging, and we play with foldables and Relay. And we see some libraries for horizontal date pickers and bi-directional scrollable composables.

Note that the newsletter emails are switching the styling of code from Buttondown’s default to simple monospace. Some subscribers were running into problems with dark theme compatibility with the original approach that used a background and border.

Also, the newsletter site also has some long-awaited improvements:

  • A customized search tool, searching by individual entry rather than by entire issues

  • Rendering improvements on mobile browsers

  • A per-issue badge, for those of you who get featured here and want to add some newsletter bling to your article or repo! (many thanks to Alex Styl for the suggestion!)

Ooooo… What Did We Get?

Reviewing the release notes for the latest Jetpack Compose update!

androidx.compose.compiler:compiler:1.4.0 was released, mostly bringing us Kotlin 1.8.0 support.

One Off the Stack, One Off the Slack

You’ve got questions. That’s understandable!

How Do We Change a Single Side’s Border?

The border() modifier support changing the width of a border, but only on all sides. What happens if you need borders with varying widths? See a couple of solutions, including the use of drawBehind(), in this week’s highlighted Stack Overflow question.

How Do We Find Our Locale(s)?

Sometimes, we will need to have our composables react to the current locale (or locales) selected by the user. What’s the best way to do that, given Android 13’s per-app locale support, as well as the changes to support multiple locales in API Level 24? See some suggestions in this week’s highlighted Kotlinlang #compose Slack thread.

Composable Commentary

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

Podcast: Android Developers Backstage on Subtext

Chet, Romain, and Tor had Siyamed Sinir and Sean McQuillan over to chat about text rendering, both in terms of platform APIs and Compose APIs.

Relay Leg 2: Tips and tricks

Kristen Halper returns, continuing an exploration of Relay for converting Figma designs to composables. Here, Kristen explores the scope of what Relay can convert (smaller = better), how it does the conversion (technically correct but sometimes not what you want), and more!

Side Effects Summary in Jetpack Compose

Vincent Tsen is back to talk about effects, an ever-popular and ever-confusing topic in Compose development. Vincent looks at a few types of effects, along with related functions like produceState(), and helps explain when you use them and why.

Medium: Jetpack Compose and Composable Preview

Tomáš Repčík takes a look at the ever-popular @Preview animation and points out some lesser-known capabilities, such as creating custom annotations to apply the same previews across multiple composables without redundancy.

Medium: 5 things to know when using Paging + Compose

Teja Narayan Chirala explores how we can use Compose’s support for Paging 3 in different ways, including using it in grids, how to leverage Paging 3’s placeholder support with composables, implementing refresh and retry logic, and more!

Understanding foldable devices: Code your UI

Thomas Künneth is back, once again to talk about his (seemingly) favorite topic: foldables. Thomas demonstrates how to use windowLayoutInfo() and computeCurrentWindowMetrics() from the Jetpack Window library to help us deal with folding displays (both ones with continuous folding screens and ones divided by hinges), as well as tablets and landscape mode.

Medium: Adapting Material Theming from Jetpack Compose to SwiftUI

Sometimes, you just have to do some work for iOS. It happens. In this post, Kashif Mehmood looks at Compose Material themes, what they are made of (colors, typography, etc.), and how those can map to equivalent concepts in SwiftUI.

Medium: Translating Objects along a Path (Part 2)

Nikhil Mandlik continues looking at animations, specifically how to animate composables along a path. Nikhil’s approach uses onGloballyPositioned(), Path, and PathMeasure to apply a cubic bezier curve to move one (or more!) composables from a start to an end position.

A comprehensive guide to Android runtime permissions using Jetpack Compose

Alex Styl returns, to help us deal with runtime permissions. Alex covers some basics of runtime permissions in general before diving into Accompanist’s runtime permissions library and showing us how to use it for both required and optional permissions.

Resource Roundup

100% pure code!

GitHub: JoelKanyi / HorizontalCalendarView

Joel Kanyi brings us a HorizontalCalendarView() composable, for showing a series of dates in a horizontally-scrolling container, for users to use to select a date.

GitHub: chihsuanwu / compose-free-scroll

Chi-Hsuan Wu is working on a freeScroll() modifier to allow you to add bi-directional scrolling to a composable, as opposed to only horizontal or vertical scrolling.

GitHub: shamimcse1 / StarTablayout

Md. Shamim Hossain has created a StarTabLayout() tabbed container, where tabs are represented as StarTabItem() objects with associated composables for the tab contents.

GitHub: razaghimahdi / Compose-Loading-Dots

GitHub user razaghimahdi brings us a trio of composables for different forms of dots animations for use as loading states.

Featured here? Please add this badge to your article or repo! As Seen In - jetc.dev Newsletter Issue #150

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