Wish Built-in support for Material Design

Material Design was developed by Google in 2014. This year they launched Material Design version 2, which I believe is still in beta. I needed a Material Navigation drawer for my app, so I started looking through the forum for alternatives.

After testing a number of solutions provided by the community I feel this is not aligned with the rest of the B4X experience. Trying to even install one of these is an surprisingly complex, and if one were to actually succeed - it's disheartening to find a post deep in another thread, saying that the library is actually unsupported.

This is not critique of the developers investing time and effort in their libraries, I do appreciate it very much. But clearly it's very complicated to get that up and running so one easily can use it (as a developer).

Considering how important Material Design is if one wants the app to look modern and feel like a "real" app, I propose that Material Design should be implemented and supported "out of the box" by Anywhere Software.

Material Design is already supported. Any app that uses the default settings will be based on the material theme.
You should request specific features that you think are missing.
I recommend you to use SlidingMenu library for a drawer. It is very simple to use and you can customize it however you like.
Example: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/appcompat-with-toolbar-minimal-example.79896/

Erel said:

Material Design is already supported. Any app that uses the default settings will be based on the material theme.

Click to expand...

Fair enough, you're right, I was overly broad in my request.

Erel said:

You should request specific features that you think are missing.

Click to expand...

My request originated from the lack of a built-in drawer that looks and behaves like a typical account-switching-drawer with Material design, or at least gave me the possibility to just add a panel and design the things myself. (An example of this is the drawer in the Gmail app.)

Erel said:

I recommend you to use SlidingMenu library for a drawer. It is very simple to use and you can customize it however you like.
Example: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/appcompat-with-toolbar-minimal-example.79896/

Click to expand...

Yes, I did find that exact example and was very excited for a while. So simple, so small. There's lots to like there. But then I realized that it didn't behave like a Material drawer. I'll post a Question for this, perhaps I missed something.

Erel said:

Material Design is already supported. Any app that uses the default settings will be based on the material theme.
You should request specific features that you think are missing.
I recommend you to use SlidingMenu library for a drawer. It is very simple to use and you can customize it however you like.
Example: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/appcompat-with-toolbar-minimal-example.79896/

Click to expand...

Can you add some default templates like Android Studio has, in which developers can choose the desired Activities?


Users can customize the designs from there on from the manifest. After choosing a template, appropriate libraries will automatically be added and an entry in the Manifest will be made.

It will solve the confusion of finding and setting up each an every material library, and the process of creating a new project will be faster an a lot more intuitive.

The answer to this feature request is in post #2. Please start a new thread for any other request.