Android terminology - android

I have created a few apps with basic features with the help of tutorials. But when I decided to explore the next level of features, I didn't know what the features were termed, and hence found it difficult to get help (features like fling, horizontal view paging, and so on). What is the indicator of the view paging called? How does one do it and with dynamic pages?

Your best bet is to go here and read.
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Flutter / App development beginner seeking wisdom, general direction

I am a student working on a senior project. It will be a very simple android app to organize karaoke. We are using Flutter for the front-end work.
My education has been in Java, but this is my first time working with Dart/Flutter, let alone on a smartphone app. I have gone through Get Started (https://flutter.io/get-started/), as well as 2-3 step-by-step youtube tutorials that help you build very simple apps from scratch. These have been helpful, but I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the organization of a Flutter app. All tutorials say "everything is a widget", as if that should make things simple. And maybe it does in the end. But I end up with so many widgets, and I am getting confused about what widget should be inside what other widget and why.
Take a look at this picture (in the middle of the picture I have the widget-tree on display). I have a stack, two columns, scaffold, container, etc. Do I really need all of those? Is this normal for a simple login page?
What helped you get a grip on Flutter? Or maybe it is app development, rather, that I am having trouble understanding. Regardless, I am getting a bit discouraged. Any advice? Maybe there is a particular tutorial that helped you a lot?
Thank you for any help.
I like to learn by downloading and running examples from the developers (like these ones in their GitHub repo).
One thing I struggled with at first too from the whole "everything is a widget" idea was figuring out how to handle state / data changes appropriately. If you're struggling with that, this Google I/O video does a great job showing how you can better architect an app in regard to handling state in a reactive way. A bit more advanced, but from beginning to end they go from their opinion on the worst way to handle state changes to their recommended way(s).

Any idea if ExpandableListView is going to be deprecated in the near future ?

I hope my question doesn't violate the rules of StackOverFlow. I am writing an android app and want to implement a list view that is expandable. I am aware of expandableLisView and 3rd party libraries of different versions of expandable recycler view such as this or this . Although, I am trying to avoid using libraries and be as native as possible. knowing that recyclerView is more recent and potentially more efficient than listViews, I am afraid that expandableListView gets deprecated at some point in the near future and google comes up with something like that for recycler view.
Just wondering if anyone is aware of such a thing or if expandableListView would be a safe bet to go with. Thanks a lot for your input.

Sidemenu with Special effect for Android

We have an IOS/Android app that is being redesigned and we're really happy with it,
Since IOS7 we are able to be more creative in terms of UX/UI and it's really wonderful.
My problem is with Android, it IS my favorite platform both in terms of Development possibilities and general ideology but for some reason it's lacking the rich content world of IOS.
We've designed a sidemenu with the following effect which is really amazing and we love it, but we can't recreate it for Android, i've consulted with several developers and they all gave me the same answer "it's a system limit".
My question is - Is it possible to recreate those effects in Android, if not then why (what's the actual limit) and if Yes, then what am i missing ?
We've designed a sidemenu with the following effect which is really amazing and we love it
You're welcome to your opinion. Personally, that would drive me nuts, and I have no idea what benefit it would give users over a regular navigation drawer.
Is it possible to recreate those effects in Android
It is unclear what specific effects concern you.
Can you resize content, such as the original content shown in the video? Yes.
Can you slide content, such as the original content shown in the video? Yes.
Can you fade in content, such as the items of the menu? Yes.
All of this is covered in the documentation. Particularly if you are targeting API Level 14+, property animation is usually the way to go, and you can try NineOldAndroids for a partial backport of those capabilities if you need to support earlier API levels.
If I missed concerns of yours, please comment, or perhaps edit your question.
To put it bluntly, user experience.
Providing an experience consistent with the Android operating system is a Priority for Google and by placing some limitations on the way you develop the UI of your app it can ensure an experience that is familiar from app to app.
You can see the UI guidelines here:
http://developer.android.com/design/get-started/ui-overview.html
Out of interest have you had your app approved by Apple yet?
Also.. Android does allow you to use a "Sliding Drawer" menu which is very similar to your effect which you could use to meet your goals (without the effect of course).
Check out the below mentioned git project. It has so many slide menu styles/animations. You can use the one you want or customize as per your need.
https://github.com/jfeinstein10/SlidingMenu
Check the below android app for the above mentioned GIT project
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slidingmenu.example

Is there an official Android section View?

List sections are used quite a lot in Android through out Google's own applications and in some of the framework's features as well, i.e. preferences.
This made me wonder if there is an offical section View available in Android? If so, it seems to be hidden.
Here's a picture from the Android Design site that shows what I'm talking about:
This made me wonder if there is an offical section View available in Android?
No, sorry. There are plenty of libraries for this, and you can probably grab some code out of AOSP for it as well, but there is nothing in the SDK for it. Just because the design folk think it is a good idea does not mean that we actually have code in the SDK to leverage such ideas.

Android - first launch interactive tutorial

I'm writing a new app for android and I would like to implement also a first launch tutorial. In particular, the tutorial has to be interactive. Basically, after a user registers to the service, a minimum settings will be required.
I'd like something like today we have into Google Apps, like Sheets, Docs and so far. The exception there is that those tutorials have the aim to explain how the app works. Here I want to have something where user can input some data.
I was looking at ShowcaseView but seems to be deprecated and old in style.
So here the question is: what is the best way to implement that? ViewPager?
I also had a look to this other question, but it did not help too much.
Any advice is really appreciated.
EDIT: I have found this other nice alternative. AppIntro It seems what I was looking for. :)
There are few I found by quick searching Github:
https://github.com/Seishin/showcaseview-android
https://github.com/worker8/TourGuide
https://github.com/amlcurran/ShowcaseView
I'm pretty sure you can find the right one for you ;)
You can do it in several ways that really depends on you and your app. Basically you can create a "Boarding" experience with ViewPager that will go thru the main screen of your app (with static images for example) where you explain the user what goes on in your app. The other way way is an interactive tutorial as the user already landed into your app - you can achieve this with something like Showcase (I'm pretty sure that there are libs on GitHub that are still maintained).
I would recommend Roman Nuriks Wizard Pager code on Github as a starting point. It's not so much a library as a sample code showing you how to do what you want.
The general approach is to use a ViewPager with some form of navigation buttons to move the user forwards and backwards through the pager Fragments.
https://github.com/romannurik/Android-WizardPager

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