The Android Wear team has released a library for creating and rendering rounded polygonal shapes. Graphics Shapes Version 1.0 can also be used to automatically animate between different shapes.

The current version is an alpha release, and can be used to work with the Polygon API to create regular or star polygons where the number of vertices is fixed. It also lets you use an optional CornerRounding parameter to say how rounded the corners should be, and to use smoothing elements for the polygon corners.

The API also lets you specify a morph operation to move between two polygons. The morph command will automatically calculate a “morph” shape whose progress can be set from 0 to 1 to animate between the starting and ending shapes. If you animate that progress over time, drawing the result on every frame, the result is a smooth animation between these new rounded shapes.

The new library provides a much easier alternative to using the Path API, and the developers say they thought it would be useful to provide simple creation of all kinds of rounded shapes, and that Graphics Shapes v1.0 paves the way for more advanced app design possibilities without the need for extensive coding expertise. They also say they wanted the options to be available not just for apps running on future platform versions, but also across much older releases, for the enjoyment of all developers and users. To achieve this, the new API uses Path objects internally. Path has been available since 1.0 and thus offers compatibility back as far as AndroidX itself goes.

More Information

Shapes Library Documentation

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