Description:

When Android was used nearly exclusively for very small screens, the one-activity/one-screen UI worked very well. Users moved from screen to screen to access different parts of a program's interface, and the Activity class (Android's concept of a task) maintained a back stack enabling quick and intuitive traversal through the strictly tree-structured workflow. This changes completely, however, when the UI is spread over the surface of a larger tablet screen. Some parts of the screen will remain constant over longer durations than others. Some parts of the screen determine the contents of other parts. A card-stack metaphor simply won't cut it anymore. With Android 3.0 SDK (API 11), Honeycomb, Android's developers introduced Fragments, a new, complex and powerful tool to encourage great large-screen UIs with consistent feel and behavior. This talk will introduce Fragments, give a thorough example of their use, and describe some of the traps that lurk in their use.

About Blake Meike

Blake Meike is an engineer with more than 30 years of experience, much of it with Java. He has built systems as large as Amazon's massively scalable AutoScaling service and as small as a pre-Android OSS/Linux based Java-like platform for cell-phones. He is currently deep in Android.