explaingit

huburt-hu/newbieguide

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

3,641JavaAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

An Android library that adds a chainable, first-time-user onboarding overlay highlighting specific views with custom explanation layouts.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((NewbieGuide))
    What it does
      Onboarding overlay
      View highlighting
      Chained API
    Tech stack
      Java
      Android
      JitPack
    Use cases
      First-time tutorials
      Multi-step guides
      Custom dialogs
    Audience
      Android developers

Code map

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filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Add a spotlight tutorial that highlights a button the first time a user opens your app.

USE CASE 2

Show a multi-step onboarding guide with custom explanation layouts around each highlighted view.

USE CASE 3

Build a dialog-style walkthrough that only dismisses when the user taps a specific button.

USE CASE 4

Control how many times a guide is shown per user with a configurable show count.

What is it built with?

JavaAndroidGradleJitPack

How does it compare?

huburt-hu/newbieguideapache/incubator-heronfabric8io/kubernetes-client
Stars3,6413,6363,649
LanguageJavaJavaJava
Setup difficultyeasyhardmoderate
Complexity2/55/53/5
Audiencedeveloperdatadeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Requires the appcompat support library already present in your Android project.

In plain English

NewbieGuide is an Android library for adding a first time user tutorial overlay to an app, the kind of highlighted spotlight that points at a button or icon and explains what it does when someone opens the app for the first time. The whole thing is built with a chained, fluent Java API, so showing a guide layer over your activity or fragment typically takes just a few lines of code. You start by calling NewbieGuide.with on an activity or fragment, give the guide a label so the library can tell different guides apart and remember which ones have already been shown, then add one or more guide pages. Each guide page can highlight a specific view, choosing its shape (rectangle, rounded rectangle, oval, or a raw region defined by coordinates), padding, and rounding, and you attach your own custom layout as the explanation content shown alongside the highlight. Because the explanation layout is just your own XML, you have full control over where the text, images, or dialogs appear relative to the highlighted view, instead of being limited to fixed positions above or below it like many similar libraries. By default a guide only shows once per label, but you can change how many times it repeats with setShowCounts, or force it to always appear during testing with alwaysShow. Newer versions add relative positioning helpers so guide layouts align consistently around a highlighted view across different screen sizes, a listener that fires once your custom layout has finished inflating so you can wire up its buttons, and click listeners on the highlighted region itself so the guide can respond when the user taps the spotlighted area rather than just dismissing it. The library is distributed through JitPack, so integrating it means adding the JitPack repository to your project's Gradle file and then declaring the dependency in your module. It requires the AndroidX or support library appcompat component already present in your project. This is a focused tool for Android developers who want an onboarding walkthrough without writing custom overlay and positioning logic themselves.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to add NewbieGuide to an Android project using JitPack and Gradle.
Prompt 2
Write Java code using NewbieGuide to highlight a button and show a custom explanation layout.
Prompt 3
Explain how to make a NewbieGuide guide page always show for testing purposes.
Prompt 4
Using NewbieGuide, add a click listener to a highlighted region that shows the next guide page.

Frequently asked questions

What is newbieguide?

An Android library that adds a chainable, first-time-user onboarding overlay highlighting specific views with custom explanation layouts.

What language is newbieguide written in?

Mainly Java. The stack also includes Java, Android, Gradle.

How hard is newbieguide to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is newbieguide for?

Mainly developer.

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