User interface for Android Wear have all the same components as a phone’s UI, they just appear a little differently. In this post we’re going to talk about Cards. You’ve most likely seen these in the Google now app, among other Material Design apps. Cards are great because they are a component that is able to provide a consistent look across multiple platforms.

We will consider this post as a deeper dive into an existing tutorial in the Android docs, but as that one states the Cards discussed here are not the same as the Cards that appear as notifications on Android Wear. See the link to better understand this distinction. Let’s go over some of the relevant classes, and we’ll discuss their differences and how to implement them.

Rising in popularity after the latest Google I/O, Android Wear is a game changer for mobile development. Wearable technology has brought benefits from a quicker access to information to a more accurate monitoring of our physical health. Developing for this platform allows you to tap into those features that are not as readily available on mobile handhelds as well as offer a more immersive experience of your product by making it available on wearable devices.

As always, the documentation will offer the most thorough insight into what is available, but I’d like to discuss how the UI development differs and how you can get started.

Along with the RecyclerViewCursorAdapter library that was released earlier this week, I have now released my second open source Android library. In collaboration with my good friend Maurício, we have built a library for including the Material Design Specs in your Android application. Currently, the library has the full color palette along with some helper methods, and some elevation resources to give the proper elevation to your components. The source code, as well as instructions for including the library can be found on GitHub, so go there to check it out and give us a star!

Today I released my first library which is for a RecyclerviewCursorAdapter.

Using a ListView to display database data becomes a lot easier when you use a CursorAdapter combined with a CursorLoader to display data from your ContentProvider. The main benefit of CursorLoader is explained in the docs:

After reading part one which discusses what Views and ViewGroups are, as well as how to create them in XML, the next step is to incorporate them into your Android application. How you use the UI you wrote depends on what it’s used for. Let’s break down some of the key things: