[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHET HAASE: Hi, welcome to "Now in Android" episode number 33.
First up, MAD Skills.
So the series continues on and on and on,
which was the original intention.
So I'm glad to see that there's excellent new technical content
coming out week by week by week.
We finished up the previous series on Kotlin and Jetpack
APIs.
There were a couple of episodes since the last "Now
in Android."
First of all, we did a livestream Q&A
with some of the people that work on these technologies.
So they answered your questions in a livestream chat
on YouTube.
That is recorded, so you can check that out and find out
how that conversation went.
And finally, there's a wrap-up blog
about all the stuff that was covered in that series.
And that has links to all the videos
and the content and other related content as well.
So check that out for the details in case
you didn't see the shows or didn't catch the links already.
MotionLayout was the next series.
That has been going for, I think, three weeks so far.
So there's three episodes that Sean [? McQuillan ?] has posted
so far talking about MotionLayout, not just the API,
but also the visual tool that makes it a lot easier to create
rich UI animations that animate in very
custom and rich ways between states in your application.
So the first episode was on constraint set animations.
This described how you use constraint sets.
That's basically the before and after states
that you animate from and to.
So how you create rich animations
using constraint sets.
Then he went in in the next episode
into keyframes, which is something
that you can use to change what the properties are
that you animate between.
And this helps you create richer animations,
so that you can vary, let's say a path between the states
so that you don't take the default linear approach of just
moving from here to there over a straight line,
but you can actually change properties along the way
and customize how that animation really
comes across to the user.
And then finally, the third episode, posted just this week,
was multiple constraint sets.
So as I said, the constraint sets
are the before and after states.
You can actually create in between states
to define states that the user is going to transition between,
again, helping you to create richer and more complex
animations for these MotionLayout UI animations.
So check out those episodes and tune
in next week for another episode.
And then we'll wrap it up in a couple of weeks with a Q&A
with some of the folks that work on MotionLayout.
Next up, AndroidX.
As usual, tons of things released.
Incremental releases, alpha, beta,
probably pre-alpha somewhere in there, RC, all of that stuff.
I want to call out in particular a couple of stable releases
that came out recently that were interesting and worth checking
out.
First of all, Autofill 1.1.
This is a version that adds APIs in AndroidX library
that sync with some of the capabilities in APIs
that were first introduced in Android 11.
So now you can use the library version
instead of calling into the platform APIs.
Makes it a little bit easier.
Similarly, biometric 1.1 also integrated APIs and capability
to sync with Android 11 changes.
So again, you can now use the AndroidX library
to get those capabilities, especially around
some of the authentication capabilities
that it has for using biometrics there.
So check that out.
It was also actually a substantial rewrite
and it reduced significantly the amount of size of that library
is going to take up in your application.
And also had lots of bug fixes and functionality
and robustness fixes along the way.
Transition 1.4.0.
This is a release that specifically
adds KTX or methods in the Kotlin extension library
that we offer to add those capabilities for the AndroidX
version.
I believe there were KTX capabilities for the platform
version of Transitions, but now you
can get that with the AndroidX version of transitions as well.
And then finally, WorkManager 2.5.
This release is all about the new capabilities
for applications that use multiple processes.
So check this out for that.
But there's other capabilities that it adds as well, including
an early version of the WorkManager tool
that integrates with Android Studio.
For that, you will need that the latest Canary version
of Android Studio, which is named Arctic Fox, which we'd
talked about on an earlier podcast episode, if you want
to know of the background around the naming and version
change in Android Studio.
Let's see, articles and videos.
A couple of articles worth checking out.
First of all, there's an article from Manuel Vivo
on Hilt around the view model component.
So this is an API that allows you to scope types
to a particular view component as opposed to the previous API
and approach of using activity retain component
where scope types are shared by all of the view models.
Also, WorkManager 2.5, a callback to previous blurb
about a minute ago.
Ben Weiss published an article on how
to use WorkManager for multiple processes using
the new capabilities of 2.5, and also talks about some
of the other changes in that library.
And finally, Motion Tags is a set of videos
that we've had for a while now that are screencasts,
showing you in depth how to use the API
and the tool for MotionLayout.
And these final two episodes in that screencast series
are on key time cycle that helps you creates richer animations,
and key trigger, which is the final episode,
talks about how to use the application to control things
like having a callback when your animation reaches
a certain point in its life cycle,
or what we call a trigger.
And a tip that John [? Hufford ?] passed on to me
is the reason that this is the final episode on triggers,
on key trigger, is because that typically was actually
used to create a lot of the rich animations
that you saw in earlier versions of the screencast.
So kind of an important capability
for doing rich things with your animations,
and rich trigger or action-oriented things
in particular.
Finally, there is a new podcast episode that we just published
last night, I think it was.
Episode number 155 on WindowManager.
So we talked to Rob Carr and Wale Ogunwale
on the WindowManager team.
This is some of the less obvious API or less obvious
functionality in the platform, because it exposes some API,
but a lot of it is just sort of at the operating system level.
This is one of the workhorses that
makes Android work, specifically in the area of managing
all those windows and all that UI surface.
We talked about some of the history
and some of the inherent complexity
in dealing with WindowManager or in what
WindowManager has to deal with.
We also talked about some of the recent developments
in that area and where WindowManager is going forward.
So check out that podcast, check out
the article for "Now in Android" 33 for all of the links
to all of the stuff that I mentioned here.
And if you like the video, go ahead and like and share
and subscribe to the Android Developers channel on YouTube.
Thanks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]