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navasmdc/materialdesignlibrary

8,927JavaAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

An Android library that adds Material Design UI components, buttons, sliders, progress bars, and more, to apps running on Android 2.2 and above. Created in 2014 and now mostly a historical reference, since Google later shipped its own official Material Design components.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((MaterialDesignLibrary))
    Components
      Flat buttons
      Floating action buttons
      Progress bars
      Sliders
    More components
      Checkboxes
      Toggle switches
      Snackbars
      Color picker
    Target
      Android 2.2 plus
      XML layouts
    Setup
      Gradle dependency
      Custom XML attributes
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Add Material Design floating action buttons and flat buttons to an Android app targeting older devices.

USE CASE 2

Use the built-in color picker and dialog components in a legacy Android app without building them from scratch.

USE CASE 3

Study how a 2014-era library backported Material Design as a reference for Android UI history.

USE CASE 4

Add Material Design sliders and snackbar notifications to a project via a single Gradle dependency.

Tech stack

JavaAndroidGradle

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

In plain English

MaterialDesignLibrary is an Android library written in Java that brings Google's Material Design visual style to older Android apps. Material Design is the visual language Google introduced with Android 5.0 (Lollipop) in 2014, featuring flat colors, animated buttons, and clean typography. This library lets developers use those same design components in apps that target Android 2.2 and above, so they could support users on much older devices while still looking modern. The library provides a set of ready-made UI components that you add to your app's layout files using XML, the same way you would add standard Android interface elements. The components included are flat buttons, rectangle buttons, floating action buttons (the circular buttons that hover in a corner), checkboxes, toggle switches, several styles of progress bars, sliders, snackbars (the small pop-up notification strips that appear at the bottom of the screen), dialogs, and a color picker. Each component is dropped into a layout file with a few lines of XML referencing the library's custom view classes. Some components have extra customization options exposed through custom XML attributes, such as setting the minimum and maximum values on a slider or disabling the entry animation on a floating button. Installing it uses Gradle, the standard Android build tool. You add a one-line dependency to your project's build file and it is included automatically. This project appears to have been created around 2014 to 2015, when Material Design was new and before Google shipped its own official Material Design support library. It is primarily of historical interest now, as Google's own libraries have since made this kind of backport unnecessary.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using MaterialDesignLibrary for Android, show me the XML to add a floating action button with animation to my layout.
Prompt 2
I want to add a Material Design snackbar to my Android app using MaterialDesignLibrary. Give me the Java code to show one with an action button.
Prompt 3
Show me how to add a MaterialDesignLibrary slider to my Android XML layout and read its value in Java.
Prompt 4
How do I add MaterialDesignLibrary as a Gradle dependency and use its flat button in my Android activity?
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