Hide the Menu Button in new API21 Toolbar - android

I'm upgrading my app to support new Google APIs.
I've been playing for a while with new Toolbars but I still can't get how to make the menu button disappears when a Drawer Layout is opened.
Reference from the Material Design page (I'm trying to achieve the one on the right):
Radial Action
I'm not trying to "replace" the button like the example but to hide it temporary with an animation.
Any suggestion would be much appreciated! Thanks

Related

Navigation Drawer Toggle Icon without toolbar

So I'm basically a total beginner in things of app programming.
I started with the "Navigation Drawer Activity" from Android studio and my problem is, I want the nav drawer toggle icon (top left corner) and the "3 dotted icon" (top right corner), but I don't want it in a toolbar.
My question is, should I remove the toolbar and keep the Icons (if so, how could I do that) or should I make the toolbar fullscreen (don't know how to remove the appname)?
Or is there any better way? Like starting from scratch and placing the icons where I want?
Thanks in advance!
What you see as "nav drawer toggle icon" is actually an ActionBarDrawerToggle object and as its name suggests it can only reside in a Toolbar.
The "3 dotted icon" is the toolbar's menu button. You can create a new button with the same icon and use it to popup a menu but it's not that simple.
Remember that the Toolbar is a container and you can customize it the way you want, so my advice is to use it because the other option is a lot harder.
You can set:
in xml
android:elevation="0dp"
or
app:elevation="0dp"
or bycode
getActionBar().setElevation(0);
to remove any elevation of the toolbar.
A few years ago I did something similar to what I think your wanting to do. I made my app so that I had a navigation drawer and settings icon but styled it so that there was no actual visible bar. This gave the app a bit so generic feel and more of a modern look. Also made the drawer and settings menu feel more integrated with the app as a whole. Unfortunately this is a bit of an involved task. For one this in a way, in the sense that they are a "guideline" and that this goes against the idea of making the flow and feel of the app to be what the user is expecting in the traditional sense, goes against the Google Material Guidlines. And two the activity templates are good for learning and generic apps. If your trying to make something that customized is generally going to require you to create everything from scratch. Three, I find I have slight of trouble with the navigation drawer template the Android Studio provides. I'll use it to play around with ideas or to get a feel of how I want my app but if I'm ready to start coding my "production level" app I then start a new project with no activity and make everything myself. Now...
It sounds like what you want is a navigation drawer, which requires a toolbar, but don't want your app name to display. The three simplest solution here would be to go to the strings.xml and in there is a line like so.
<string name:"app_name">YourAppName</string>
Clear that line. (This may cause issues I haven't treated recently and am unable to atm)
There will still be a visible bar across the top though. So if that is not the desired effect, it would be simpler to create a new project with either a black activity or no activity. Google search Android how to create styles and themes and then Google search android navigation drawer with kotlin. Look for a tutorial that shows how to make a navigation drawer from either a blank activity or no activity. Then you will have to create your own style that either doesn't have a color or set the background transparency, of the appbar which is inside/apart of the toolbar, to 100%. I can't remember which because it's been a long time.
I hope this helps.
P.S. Thanks for this question it gives me a great idea for a blog post on my website "How to create a Navigation Drawer with no visible app bar in Kotlin". Once I get it made I'll add a link and can maybe edit my answer with some code detailing the style and theme modifications.

Animating a Floating Action Button Activity Transition

The Material Design Guidelines suggest that you transition a floating action button into a new Activity, after you click on the button.
Example Video from Guidelines
I tried to animate this with Activity transition, as intoduced in API 21 (Lollipop) but I can't find a way to transform from the color of the button to the color of the toolbar. (I used this Floating Action Button)
Obviously, the example isn't an actual demo running on android, but the device that is displayed is clearly a smartphone. Therefore there has to be a way to code this kind of transition, or else Google would not have added this on their Guidelines, would they?
Can I use Activities to achieve this or do I have to use Fragments?
As FloatingActionButton descends from ImageButton and adds only a few new methods,you can use setBackgroundColor() of ImageButton to change its background.

Moving a view left of the screen

My android app UI have two parts- a menu bar (blue color) and content area (gray color).
Here red is the device screen.
The menu bar should open from left to right whene the hamburger menu is clicked.
I tried with ViewSwitcher but that shows only one view at a time.
What is the right method to implement it?
UPDATE: I am looking for the solution for API level 10 onwards.
In the newest version of the ADT you can select Navigation Drawer as navigation type when you create a new Activity. This automatically implements this type of navigation for you.
Alternatively, check out this tutorial: http://developer.android.com/training/implementing-navigation/nav-drawer.html
If you are happy with the navigation bar overlaying the content, then use the navigation drawer as suggested.
Alternatively check out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.desarrollodroide.repos
There are many open source libraries that you can pick and test, and then decide which one to grab the code for.

Custom Navigation Drawer

as I pursue my study on android app development I came across this app from apple and I was wondering if, is there a way to imitate the navigation drawer in this screen shot?!
See it's an expandable navigation drawer. a list view with some items that are expandable. Is there an actual way to imitate this on android?
Thank you very much again for all of your help.
You can recreate that drawer.
You can use the ExpandableListView within the Navigation Drawer. And of course you'll have to create your own parent and child item layouts for the listview. As well as appropriate styling. You can use tutorials to do this, first create the navigation drawer, then create the expandablelistview and put it within the navaigation drawer layout.
I'd also like to note on that screen shot, the drawer is incorrect. It should slide out below the action bar, over-top of the activity (like in the link). It should not slide the entire application window to the right like how some apps do.
Use a Custom ListView for this, see here for that: How To Create A Custom Listview - Android Example
Also, you will have to create specialized buttons that have a different look than standard holo buttons, see here for that: How to create custom button in Android using XML Styles
Finally, I do not believe it is possible to directly clone the navigation drawer, as the app you showed doesn't have an open sourced app (as far as I know).

Benefits of native ActionBar vs custom implementation?

I would like to try and use the native Google ActionBar class for my application however, I would like to be able to change the left most image dynamically, disable the icon and center the title. I was wondering if this is possible of if I should implement my own ActionBar?
My reason for wanting to change the left most image (IE the navigation drawer indicator) is because I am using the navigation drawer but on some screens would like to display the up indicator instead.
Looking through the documentation for the ActionBarDrawerToggle, there is a method to enable/disable the navigation drawer icon (setDrawerIndicatorEnabled), when disabled it reverts to the home-as-up indicator.
Another option is to recreate the drawer in those specific screens you want the icon different and specify the new icon in the creation of the drawer, not sure if this would work though.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v4/app/ActionBarDrawerToggle.html
Here is the android guide which explains how to do this, but allow me to give a brief overview.
You do not have to have the app icon as the leftmost icon so in certain pages you can disable it by specifying another "android:logo" item in the XML file, or by simply diabling it entirely.
The android logo, which is what you are talking about as the "leftmost item", can have an onClickListener() set for it which is how you can change it simply to an uparrow image which you can download from google.

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