/Android-MaterialPreference

[DEPRECATED] A simple backward-compatible implementation of a Material Design Preference aka settings item

Primary LanguageJavaMIT LicenseMIT

DEPRECATED

Android-MaterialPreference is deprecated. No more development will be taking place.

Use Google's official support libraries instead com.android.support:preference-v7 and com.android.support:preference-v14.

If you need some assistance in building a fully Material Design settings screen, here is a great series of blog articles on this topic:
Building an Android Settings Screen (Part 1) - How to Create and Fix the Overview Screen
Building an Android Settings Screen (Part 2) - How to Create and Fix the Dialogs
Building an Android Settings Screen (Part 3) - How to Create Custom Preferences
Building an Android Settings Screen (Part 4) - How to Use a Custom Layout for the Preference Fragment

Android - MaterialPreference

Screenshots

  • Here's a side-by-side comparison with a native Lollipop preference:

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Usage

In your settings XML file that describes your preferences (must be located in res/xml/ folder) just use the custom implementations like this:

<com.jenzz.materialpreference.PreferenceCategory
  android:title="Material Category">

  <com.jenzz.materialpreference.Preference
    android:title="Material Preference"
    android:summary="Material Summary" />

  <com.jenzz.materialpreference.CheckBoxPreference
    android:title="Material CheckBoxPreference"
    android:summaryOn="Material CheckBox Summary On"
    android:summaryOff="Material CheckBox Summary Off" />

</com.jenzz.materialpreference.PreferenceCategory>

That's it. You can use all the attributes you know from the original preferences.

You're probably wondering why there are only Material Design versions of Preference, PreferenceCategory and CheckBoxPreference. Where are ListPreference, EditTextPreference, etc? I don't use them. Instead I just show a simple Preference and display a Material Design dialog when the user selects it. I highly recommend using the material-dialogs library for that.

Theming

  • On Lollipop, the preference color is derived from the android:colorAccent attribute of your app theme.
  • If you're using AppCompat, it is inherited from the colorAccent attribute.
  • If you want a totally different color for your preferences (why would you?), you can still override it in your app theme like this:
<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
  <item name="mp_colorAccent">#bada55</item>
</style>

Also note that the Activity hosting your preferences screen must extend ActionBarActivity in order for the CheckBox tinting to work. The easiest solution to accomplish that is to delegate all your preferences logic (including the inflation) to a PreferenceFragment just like it is done in the sample project.

Example

Check out the sample project for an example implementation.

Download

Grab it via Gradle:

compile 'com.jenzz:materialpreference:1.3'

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.