Jetpack Compose 1.0 and the stable release of Android Studio Arctic Fox should make developers happy this summer.
This week the Google Android developer team unveiled two important product releases for their developer base. The first is the 1.0 version of Jetpack Compose. This is Android’s toolkit for building native user interfaces. The second unveiling is of the stable release of the Android Studio Arctic Fox. This app is a visual code editor to help developers better utilize the features in Jetpack Compose.
The new release of Jetpack Compose 1.0 was announced in a blog post this week. Anna-Chiara Bellini, Product Manager, and Nick Butcher, Developer Relations, detailed the release. “We designed Compose to make it faster and easier to build native Android apps,” they write.
“With a fully declarative approach, you just describe your UI, and Compose takes care of the rest.”
“To support new workflows and a different way of thinking, we are delivering new tools, designed specifically for Compose, and adding support for Compose to some of our existing tooling.”
Enter Arctic Fox
The new Compose Preview feature is now available in Android Studio Arctic Fox. This allows developers to see their Composables in different states. They can compare light and dark theme, or different font scalings, all at the same time. This makes component development easier, they say.
The app also offer enhanced with live editing of literals, which allows developers to see updates without recompiling their project.
Deploy Preview is another new too. It allows developers to test parts of the UI on a device, without having to navigate through their app to the screen they are working on. Now they can just create a preview for their Composable, and deploy it on their device for fast iteration.
Layout Inspector – another new feature – adds support for Composables. This helps developers to “confidently” mix Compose with existing Views.
“We really believe that Jetpack Compose is a huge leap forward,” they write. “Now that Compose is stable at 1.0, it’s time to get started; there’s nothing better than getting right to the code.”
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