Motion with Animated Vector Drawablesīecause vector drawables describe a recipe of what you want displayed on the screen, it’s very easy to modify this recipe on the fly to provide a wide range of effects, including animated vector drawables (represented by the AnimatedVectorDrawable type). This means that you can fairly easily reuse any SVG you might have (or that your graphic editor can produce) by massaging it into an Android vector drawable. The format of the XML file is voluntarily modeled after another existing vector graphics file format (of which it shares the same path expression syntax): SVG.

This example draws this well known media player action icon: you can reference them in layouts, styles, acquire them through Resources.GetDrawable, etc.).īut let’s see an example of what a vector drawable looks like in all its XML glory: Indeed, where the world was happily spread between LDPI, MDPI and HDPI a few years ago, today we just don’t know how many ‘x’ will be able to fit in front of ‘HDPI’ (at the time of this writing we have reached XXXHDPI).Īdditionally, like any other drawable, vector drawables are natively understood by the Android toolchain, which makes their use as seamless as feasible (i.e. As such, contrary to other bitmap-based images, they don’t need to have extra variations based on screen-densities. With Android Lollipop, the recipes that make vector drawables are directly written in an XML format very much like their older cousins, shape drawables.īoth vector drawables and shape drawables share the same core benefit of being rendered on-demand by the system, and thus always at the right resolution. To display that recipe on a screen, the system converts it back at run-time to the same pixel data that it would have gotten from a bitmap file through a process called rasterization.

Raster graphics describe (in some encoded form) the actual color value of each pixel of an image, whereas vector graphics contain the recipe, via a series of draw commands, to create the desired result. What exactly are vector drawables? As their name implies, vector drawables are based on vector graphics, as opposed to raster graphics.ĭevelopers should already be familiar with raster graphics in the assortment of PNG, JPEG, and other image files that populate your Android apps. They manage to both solve one of the oldest Android pain points (wide range of screen densities) and also pave the way for much better interactions in our apps.

Among the many novelties brought to Android in 5.0 Lollipop, vector drawables are one of my favorite additions.

Vector graphics app for android