101 posts
NavigationBar, NavigationRail and the drawer are three presentations of the same destination list. Window size decides which, and NavigationSuiteScaffold does the switching — with rules about how many destinations belong there at all.
Dialogs and bottom sheets are composables that exist conditionally, not imperative calls. Modelling them as state fixes the rotation bug, the double-show bug, and the question of where the result goes.
Compose has two TextField APIs. The String + onValueChange pair has real problems with cursor position and asynchronous updates; the TextFieldState overload solves them and is now the recommended one.
Checkboxes, radio buttons and switches encode different semantics — multiple choice, exclusive choice, and immediate effect. Choosing by appearance produces interfaces that mislead, and the accessibility story differs too.
Material 3 ships five button styles plus the FAB. They form an emphasis hierarchy, and the selection rule is about how many actions compete on a screen rather than about how each one looks.
Scaffold arranges the app shell and hands back the insets its own bars consume. Ignoring that PaddingValues is the single most common Compose layout bug, and edge-to-edge makes it worse.
Android 16 makes external displays a mainstream concern. The layout work is mostly window size classes you already have; the new parts are density, input capability and deciding what belongs on which screen.
Foldables give two things a resize doesn't: a posture and a hinge with real coordinates. Handling them well means avoiding the seam and using tabletop mode, not just supporting a new width.
SupportingPaneScaffold docks secondary content beside a primary view on wide windows and collapses it to a sheet on narrow ones. Choosing it over list-detail is a question about what the second pane contains.
ListDetailPaneScaffold adapts a list and detail across window sizes, but its real value is the navigator — which makes back pop the detail on compact and exit the screen on expanded, from one implementation.
Material's canonical layouts give three tested patterns for adapting across window sizes. Knowing which one a screen is saves designing an adaptive layout from scratch, and the library implements two of them directly.
Window size classes replace device-type checks with a measure of the window your app actually occupies. Three buckets per axis, recomputed live, and the reason isTablet() has been wrong for years.
