Compose, aka Jetpack Compose, is a Google-made toolkit for building app UIs. Formally launched last year, the first stable version of the toolkit for Wear OS arrived in July this year. Google says Compose has enabled developers significantly boost developer productivity by reducing development time. The powerful tools and intuitive APIs that it offers have also made apps more efficient, increasing their usage. Version 1.1 of Compose now adds new features and also improves existing components to further assist developers. For starters, we have a new outlined style for Chips and Buttons. These composable elements feature a transparent component with a thin border and come in compact versions as well. Google says they can be used for medium-emphasis actions. The company now also lets developers change the shapes for Chip/ToggleChip and Button/ToggleButton components. Compose for Wear OS 1.1 further adds a placeholder API. It lets you achieve three distinct visual effects simultaneously or separately. “These effects are designed to be coordinated and shimmer and wipe off in an orchestrated fashion,” the company explains. Additionally, curved text that some apps show around the screen now supports new parameters, including fontFamily, fontWeight, fontStyle, and fontSynthesis. The scroll effect also gets some new features with this release, while Google has also updated its samples, codelab, and Horologist libraries. The latest version of Compose for Wear OS brings tons of improvements as well. ToggleChip and SplitToggleChip now support animated toggle controls instead of static icons. Chip/ToggleChip and Cards get improved default gradient colors that match the latest UX specification. The MaterialTheme, meanwhile, gets new default colors with enhanced contrast to improve accessibility. UX components like Picker, InlineSlider and Stepper also get improvement. You can find the full release notes here.
Compose for Wear OS 1.1 is now available for developers
The latest Jetpack Compose release for Wear OS, i. e. version 1.1 is now available for developers. Google says this release requires version 1.3 of androidx.compose libraries and Kotlin 1.7.10. Interested developers can refer to the official release notes for more information. For end users, Wear OS apps built with Compose 1.1 could start showing up in a few months. Expect some popular apps to get UI tweaks and improvements with future updates.
