The Android development team has announced several new features in version 1.4 of the UI toolkit Jetpack Compose.
First, there is now support for vertical and horizontal paging. This enables users to flip through content with a page flip animation, as if they were actually reading a physical book or magazine. Previously in order to get this functionality, Android developers would go through the Accompanist library, which is now being replaced by the built-in paging support.
There are also new Flow Layouts, which can be used to layout items in dynamically sized containers. This allows items to flow into the next row or column when they run out of space.
Another improvement in this release is that the “Text” and “TextField” are much more customizable. “Text” has new features for drawing outlined text, improving text transition and legibility during animations, options for line breaking behavior, hyphenation support, and more.
The Android team is also continuing its refactor of Modifier, and several foundational modifiers were moved to the Modifier.Node architecture, such as “graphicsLayer,” lower level focus modifiers, padding, and offset.
There were also improvements to several existing features and bug fixes, which you can read more about in the release notes here.
