Learn Android, Angular-material and Clojurescript

A lot of the time, web apps are built primarily with the desktop layout in consideration, and the mobile layout suffers as a result. In this course we are going to discuss using features of user interface which are optimised for mobile devices.

We are going to discuss CSS features that make a big difference and build entire components that work great on mobile devices and browsers. We are going to take into account browser support to ensure our users are getting the experience we want them to.

More and more of our users depend on their mobile device to use our web apps. With this in mind, we are going to look at how to optimise the components we build for smaller viewports, and how to ensure our customer gets an optimised version of our web app for their device.

We are going to discuss different ways we can view, test, and debug our web app in a mobile setting so that we know what we are seeing is what our user is seeing, because sometimes a desktop browser emulating a mobile device just isn’t enough.


HTML 5 is the structure of our web pages. It is the markup that represents the DOM (document object model).

html

Optimize User Experience for Mobile Devices and Browsers

Angular Material is an Angular-native, UI component framework from Google. It is a reference implementation of Google's Material Design and provides >30 UI components and services essential for mobile and desktop AngularJS applications.

In this course, we will quickly build a real-work application Angular UI application, take a tour of Angular Material, and learn how ngMaterial can be used in your projects.

*presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost*

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Introduction to AngularJS Material

Open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with Angular, TypeScript or JavaScript.

nativescript

We will learn how to add an Android library to our project and translate it’s Java api to NativeScript. For this lesson, we will look at [Filestack’s Android SDK](https://github.com/filestack/filepicker-android) built with Gradle. Specifically, we will cover how to immediately start working with the library even when a [NativeScript](/q/nativescript) plugin does not exist for it.

Use an Android library in NativeScript for Angular using Java apis

Java has been around a long time and when it comes to Android, you will encounter some structures that may throw you for a loop on how to code against with NativeScript. Let’s examine a few common Java/Android api constructs you may encounter and how to translate them to NativeScript. Learn how to get references to local files in your app using the ‘file-system’ module as well as how to take advantage of NativeScript’s Observable class to send notification events from one class to another. Lastly, look at considerations with Angular’s NgZone when handling your native libraries data events to update component view bindings.

Translate common Java/Android APIs into NativeScript for Angular Android apps

The Angular Material Layout API wraps the flexbox CSS features with an amazingly easy, powerful HTML markup API. The Layout API hides the complexities of the CSS, is intuitive to use, and eliminates the need for developers to become flexbox experts to implement modern page layouts. 

In this lesson we will learn how to use the Angular Material Container components and the Layout API to implement the layouts specified in design wireframe.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost. 

Angular Material: Containers with the Layout API

Themes convey meaning through color, tones, and contrasts. And the theme color palettes, alphas, and shadows deliver a consistent tone to your application and a unified feel for all Angular Material UI components. Theming allows developers to change the intention and meaning of the application by changing the colors and shadows. 

Accessibility is a huge - often overlooked - feature in modern web applications. Angular Material components all implement ARIA features whenever possible. And for usage scenarios where the ARIA attributes are not explicitly provided and cannot be inferred, then Angular Material will provide details console warnings alerting the developer.

Let’s use the Angular Material Theming service to change the background, primary, accent, and warning colors used within the entire application. These will be configured at startup using the $mdThemeProvider.  

Let’s also resolve the two ARIA warnings shown in console. These originate from icon buttons where the ARIA label cannot be inferred. So let’s add a static aria-label and a dynamic, interpolated aria-label to those buttons.

> This course presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost

Angular Material: Theming and ARIA

One of the exciting benefits you have with NativeScript is the ability to write native code (Java and Objective C) directly in JavaScript/TypeScript allowing you to create a consistent high level api over top of both underlying iOS Objective C/Swift and Android Java apis. In this lesson, we will look at how to design a consistent api that taps into the appropriate native api’s on the target platforms using underlying native libraries.

Develop a consistent plugin api across your Android and iOS NativeScript app

Learn how to install Angular Material with `npm install`  and load the required libraries and stylesheets into your blank web page.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost

Angular Material: Installing with NPM

To prepare your development environment to code against native apis such as Objective C, Swift and Java, let's learn how to [install tns-platform-declarations](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tns-platform-declarations) to provide rich intellisense support for all the native iOS and Android api’s. This lesson will cover how to modify your tsconfig.json and references.d.ts properly to ensure working with native api’s is smooth and as helpful as possible.

Prepare for native iOS and Android api intellisense with NativeScript

Angular is a development platform for creating applications using modern web standards. Angular includes a wealth of essential features such as mobile gestures, animations, filtering, routing, data binding, security, internationalization, and beautiful UI components. It's extremely modular, lightweight, and easy to learn.

angular

This lesson explores the Angular Material sidenav component. This includes input and display options, creating a sidenav with a nav list, and utilizing the `@angular/cdk` to update sidenav settings based on the users screen size.

Use the Angular Material Sidenav Component

Building a custom NativeScript XML view component for Android is uniquely different than it’s iOS counterpart because of the Android Context which must be considered. Let’s look at how to properly build a custom view component based on an underlying native view widget. We will also look at what happens when our include.gradle file is not setup properly including handling problems with minimum sdk targets with plugins. Specifically, we will implement this Android widget representing the [Google I/O 2016 clock](https://github.com/lypeer/GoogleClock). Learn how to create a custom AndroidManifest.xml inside your plugin to merge with your app's manifest to override certain characteristics. Read detailed documentation about the [Android app manifest file](https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/manifest-intro.html).

Build a custom NativeScript view component for Android

Most Angular Material UI components are declarative and used directly in the HTML markup. Some components, however, are programmatic and must be configured and invoked from Javascript. Programmatic components have a short-term, limited DOM lifespan and include Dialogs, Toast, and BottomSheet.

Let’s use the BottomSheet service to configure and display an Angular Material BottomSheet container which in turn will display a nested, custom Contact Sheet view.

> This course presented by by Thomas Burleson & Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: Using a BottomSheet

Both flexbox CSS and the Angular Material Layout allow web applications to `respond` to the size of the browser at any given point. No matter what the browser width may be, the web app adjusts its layout sizing accordingly. Combine responsive functionality with media query support and your web applications will have `adaptive` features to adapt to the width of the browser at a specific points. More than fluidly adjusting the widths and heights of elements, Adaptive applications can change the rendered UX with new positions, new components, and new styles. Angular Material Layout hides the complexities of implementing adaptive features with a singularly unique and simple HTML syntax.
Let’s use the Adaptive extensions of the Angular Material API to hide the SideNav on small devices (like iPhone or Android). We will explore the use of the $mdMedia service to easily lock open the SideNav on larger devices. And we will see how the $mdSideNav service can be used to programmatically close the SideNav after a user is selected.

> This course presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: Adaptive Layouts

Angular Material provides over 30 UI components and services. The framework offers a suite of components and containers: from simple Button components with built-in ink and hover effects, theming, and ARIA support… to more complex container components like mdList and Tabs.  

Let’s use some of those components in our SideNav and Content containers. For now we will use hard-coded, HTML markup. This allows us to confirm the UX matches that specified in the design docs before we start working on our application logic.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: Intro to UI Components

Angular Material UI components have been designed from the ground-up to use dynamic, live data. Supporting AngularJS interpolation, expressions, and databindings… each component exposes an intuitive API and fully supports the existing ng-<xxx> directives published in AngularJS.

Let’s replace the hard-coded, static HTML with dynamic, mock data using AngularJS data bindings, ng-repeat, and the ng-click directives. Our UX remains unchanged, yet now we are using custom application logic and dataservices.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson & Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: UI Components with Dynamic Data

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

Learn to write components that render differently on iOS and Android, but present the same API. First, we'll use the Platform module to change behavior based on the platform. Then, we'll use the platform-specific file extensions, .ios.js and .android.js, to render platform-specific components.


Writing Platform-Specific Components for iOS and Android in React Native

In this lesson, we will start with a list of content from a React Native FlatList that we will then transform into a three-per-row grid.

Display Contents of a React Native FlatList as a Grid

This lesson explores the angular material datepicker component. This includes basic setup and configuration options, validation and date range scenarios, configuring the datepicker for touch use, and how to utilize momentjs with the material datepicker.

Manage Date Selection with the Angular Material Datepicker



This lesson demonstrates how to utilize the Angular Material dialog module for application dialogs. We will touch on methods to present and close dialogs, configuring your dialog to accept data, and responding to user actions when a dialog is dismissed.


Manage Application Dialogs with the Angular Material Dialog Component

This lesson explores the Angular Material datatable component. This includes configuring your data source, setup of row and column templates, and adding filtering and paging to your datatable.


Manage Tabular Data with the Angular Material Datatable Component

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the `SafeAreaView` component to avoid the sensor cluster (the notch) and home activity indicator on the iPhone X.