Material Design is a design language developed in 2014 by Google. It is a comprehensive guide for visual, motion, and interaction design across platforms and devices. To use material design in your Android apps, follow the guidelines defined in the material design specification and use the new components and styles available in the material design support library.
Material Design can be used in API Level 21 (Android 5.0) and newer or via the v7 appcompat library. Let’s Breakdown the term API, API stands for Application programming interface.
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine (sub software) definitions, protocols, and tools for building application software. Short API makes easier to software programming for a specific module with minor changes. An API may be for web-based, operating system, software library, database system, computer hardware etc.
Implementation
As you can see we all around with wonderful mobile apps & google products, nobody undisturbed from as Google, Youtube, Gmail, Google docs, sheet , Google Keeps etc. over there use API do you know ? Google has also released application programming interfaces (APIs) for third-party developers to incorporate the design language into their applications.
Let’s look a example if we want to register with google so we use Client key & client secret of API which is you can directly generate with google developer console without any cost, after using this keys put into you plugin with will works that you are able to register with google account, the same concept behind with mobile material design at Android platform beyond the coding part.
Let’s move to Material Design which some features provided by Android
- A material design app theme to style all your UI widgets
- Widgets for complex views such as lists and cards
- New APIs for custom shadows and animations
To take more advantages for theme & widgets from material design you should familiar with UI and most common UX patterns, by material design you can craft navigation, search, navigation drawer, toolbars, tabs, shadow, layout and navigation etc.
You can also implementation in Elevation shadows & cards Elevation is often applied when your layout includes a card-based layout, which helps you display important pieces of information inside cards that provide a material look.
Animations, The new animation APIs let you create custom animations for touch feedback in UI controls, changes in view state, and activity transitions. Revolutions with animation like touch feedback, circular reveal, activity transition, curved motion, state list drawables etc.
Touch feedback animations are built into several standard views, such as buttons. The new APIs let you customize these animations and add them to your custom views. Just we need to changes and implementation of our coding there is new and latest huge usable designing for any mobile app development
