Announcing New Course: Resizable Apps & Multi-Window Support in Android!

Announcing new Pro Course: Resizable Apps & Multi-Window Support in Android!

What are you doing with all your free time lately?

Right! Trick question — who's got free time these days? That's why one of the best things you can do for your app is to let your users multi-task while performing other activities.

Learn how to make your apps resizable, and in turn support multi-window mode, in our new Resizable Apps & Multi-Window Support in Android course!

Keep reading to hear more about it from course instructor Filip Babić:

Why should I take your resizable apps & multi-window course?

"As companies manufacture more and more Android devices each year, with different form-factors and sizes, we get the ability to build more flexible apps that support multi-tasking.

Using the Multi-Window mode and resizable apps, which you'll learn about in this course, you can let your users run your app in split-screen mode. This means they can run both your app and another of their choosing, side-by-side, allowing them to work on multiple things at the same time.

It's a modern and powerful feature that you can implement not only for tablets but regular mobile devices, Chromebooks, and more!"

How do you use resizable apps in your job?

"Having the ability to build resizable apps, we've managed to improve our raywenderlich.com app (codenamed emitron), and allow our users to watch video courses while they're taking notes or browsing the Internet.

This is a great feature for that use case, as it helps the user do multiple things at the same time, without having to jump between apps! For this reason, we recommend implementing resizable apps if it suits your app and your use cases, as it can greatly improve the experience of a modern Android user.

What surprised me (and will probably surprise you too), is how easy the feature is to implement! From the very basic setup of required flags to lifecycle handling and the drag & drop feature, the code is fairly short and straightforward, without any room for confusion or messing it up."

Can you please share a cool multi-window tip with us?

"Not only in Multi-Window mode, but also any other type of configuration change, you can rely heavily on the onConfigurationChanged() function. Overriding it provide you with the new configuration you're in and you can react to that configuration by completely changing your UI structure:

Within this simple function, you'll receive constant updates, whenever the user resizes your screen, some of the screen properties change, such as density, color settings, the language and so on. This is great, as you can update your app accordingly in any of those changes, as long as you let the system know that you'll handle these changes, instead of the system.

To let the system know that, add similar flags to any of your Activity tags in the AndroidManifest:

Is there anything else we should know about your course?

"Similar to the Picture-In-Picture mode, using the resizable app support and Multi-Window mode, it's best to think of use cases that make sense for your app. If a specific part of your app should support split-screen, then this feature can be extremely helpful to your users.

But, if your app requires immediate attention and lots of screen real-estate, then try to think about other ways to implement Multi-Window mode for your app, or about changing the UI structure to help your users in split-screen."

🎉 Until April 16, save over 50% off an Ultimate Pro yearly subscription! 🎉
Get this course — along with all courses and books — for one low price.

raywenderlich.com/subscription ➜

Filip's Resizable Apps & Multi-Window Support in Android course is available for Pro subscribers now!

— Ray