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Part 1, UI Widgets from scratch in Jetpack Compose
Tutorial Part 1 of 3 (an iOS styled Home Screen List).
Jetpack Compose is probably the most significant thing that has happened to Android in ten years, perhaps, as significant as Kotlin, coroutines, and Android Studio based on IntelliJ — this is my humble opinion, of course.
We have already begun using the SwiftUI at work, and we have plans to start using Jetpack Compose as soon as it loses its beta status. Also, even though declarative programming is not a new concept, it has recently shown great benefits, particularly for UI programming, e.g., SwiftUI, Flatter, React, and HTML, of course. So, I was reading the articles, viewing tutorials and talks, for quite a long time, but I couldn’t find time to get my hands dirty to do something useful.
The best way to learn any new technology is to build something, but, I don’t like building the “hello world” apps! I prefer doing something useful, something that solves a problem, at least for me.
Finally, when JC has turned into a beta, during one of the long weekends when the weather has locked us at home and kids preferred to play Minecraft than reading or playing together, I got enough time to begin! And as you know: — “It’s easy to begin and yet impossible to end!”
I decided to make an Android version of my existing iOS app in Compose.
StudyCards — it’s my version of the flashcards for the humans that my kids and I use to memorize things. It’s not a hit on the market yet, but we will see what happens when the Android version is ready.
StudyCards app includes three screens, a few dialogs, animations, input text, text to speech, sharing decks, and one screen of a Watch app.
This tiny app is an ideal candidate to build while learning new technology!
In a few upcoming articles, I will show you how I implemented some UI elements from scratch:
