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jfeinstein10/slidingmenu

11,010JavaAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

Android library that adds a slide-out navigation panel to any app, the style made popular by Facebook and YouTube, without writing custom animation or touch code.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((SlidingMenu))
    What it does
      Slide-out navigation
      Touch animation
      Behind-screen reveal
    Integration
      Attach to Activity
      Extend base class
      XML layout view
    Configuration
      Slide direction
      Visible width
      Shadow appearance
      Background scroll
    Tech stack
      Java
      Android
      Apache 2.0
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Add a slide-out side navigation panel to an existing Android Activity with a few lines of Java.

USE CASE 2

Embed a sliding menu directly into an Android XML layout file inside another container view.

USE CASE 3

Configure the menu to slide from the left or right with a customizable visible-width and shadow.

Tech stack

JavaAndroid

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Designed for older Eclipse-based Android project structure, may need minor adaptation for modern Android Studio Gradle projects.

Use freely for any purpose including commercial apps, as long as you include the Apache 2.0 license and copyright notice.

In plain English

SlidingMenu is an Android library that lets developers add a slide-out navigation menu to their apps. The style became popular in apps like Facebook, YouTube, and Google+ in the early 2010s: the main screen slides sideways to reveal a menu panel hidden behind it. This library packages that interaction pattern so developers can add it to their own apps without writing the animation and touch-handling code from scratch. The README lists several well-known apps that used this library, including Foursquare, LinkedIn, Evernote Food, VLC for Android, Wunderlist 2, and The Verge, giving a sense of how widely it was adopted during its active period. There are three ways to use it in a project. You can attach the sliding menu to an existing screen with a few lines of code, you can make your screen extend a special base class the library provides, or you can drop the sliding menu directly into a layout file as a standard view component. The third approach is the most flexible and lets you place the sliding menu inside other containers. The library offers a number of configuration options, including which direction the menu slides from, how much of the original screen stays visible when the menu is open, whether a shadow appears between the two layers, and how the background panel scrolls relative to the foreground. These are set either in code or through XML attributes in a layout file. The project is Java-based and was designed for Android development using the Eclipse IDE with an older project structure. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Note that Android development tooling and UI patterns have changed significantly since this library was widely used, so it may not be the current standard approach for slide-out menus.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to attach SlidingMenu to an existing Android Activity and set it to reveal from the left with 80% of the screen visible behind it.
Prompt 2
How do I configure SlidingMenu to slide from the right, show a shadow between layers, and have the background scroll at half speed?
Prompt 3
Write an Android XML layout that embeds SlidingMenu as a view component inside a LinearLayout.
Prompt 4
How do I make my Activity extend SlidingActivity instead of attaching SlidingMenu manually, and what does that change?
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