Posted by Chris Assigbe – Developer Relations Engineer and Tom Buckley – Product Supervisor
With stylus enter, Android apps on telephones, foldables, tablets, and Chromebooks develop into much more highly effective instruments for productiveness and creativity. Whereas there’s already so much to consider when designing for big screens – see our full steerage and inspiration gallery – styluses are particularly impactful, remodeling these gadgets right into a digital pocket book or sketchbook. Customers count on stylus experiences to really feel as fluid and pure as writing on paper, which is why Android beforehand added APIs to scale back inking latency to as little as 4ms; just about imperceptible. Nonetheless, latency is only one facet of an inking expertise – builders at present must generate stroke shapes from stylus enter, render these strokes rapidly, and effectively run geometric queries over strokes for instruments like choice and eraser. These capabilities can require vital funding in geometry and graphics simply to get began.
As we speak, we’re excited to share Ink API, an alpha Jetpack library that makes it straightforward to create, render, and manipulate lovely ink strokes, enabling builders to construct superb options on prime of those APIs. Ink API builds upon the Android framework’s basis of low latency and prediction, offering you with a strong and intuitive toolkit for integrating wealthy inking options into your apps.
What’s Ink API?
Ink API is a complete stylus enter library that empowers you to rapidly create modern and expressive inking experiences. It presents a modular structure moderately than a one-size-fits-all canvas, so you’ll be able to tailor Ink API to your app’s stack and desires. The modules embody key functionalities like:
- Strokes module: Represents the ink enter and its visible illustration.
- Geometry module: Helps manipulating and analyzing strokes, facilitating options like erasing, and choosing strokes.
- Brush module: Supplies a declarative solution to outline the visible model of strokes, together with colour, dimension, and the kind of software to attract with.
- Rendering module: Effectively shows ink strokes on the display screen, permitting them to be mixed with Jetpack Compose or Android Views.
- Stay Authoring module: Handles real-time inking enter to create clean strokes with the bottom latency a tool can present.
Ink API is appropriate with gadgets working Android 5.0 (API degree 21) or later, and presents advantages on all of those gadgets. It could actually additionally benefit from latency enhancements in Android 10 (API 29) and improved rendering results and efficiency in Android 14 (API 34).
Why select Ink API?
Ink API supplies an out-of-the-box implementation for fundamental inking duties so you’ll be able to create a novel drawing expertise in your personal app. Ink API presents a number of benefits over a completely customized implementation:
- Ease of Use: Ink API abstracts away the complexities of graphics and geometry, permitting you to focus in your app’s distinctive inking options.
- Efficiency: Constructed-in low latency help and optimized rendering guarantee a clean and responsive inking expertise.
- Flexibility: The modular design permits you to choose and select the parts you want, tailoring the library to your particular necessities.
Ink API has already been adopted throughout many Google apps due to these benefits, together with for markup in Docs and Circle-to-Search; and the underlying know-how additionally powers markup in Pictures, Drive, Meet, Preserve, and Classroom. For Circle to Search, the Ink API modular design empowered the workforce to make the most of solely the parts they wanted. They leveraged the reside authoring and brush capabilities of Ink API to render an exquisite stroke as customers circle (to look). The workforce additionally constructed customized geometry instruments tailor-made to their ML fashions. That’s modularity at its most interesting.
“Ink API was our first selection for Circle-to-Search (CtS). Using their in depth documentation, integrating the Ink API was a breeze, permitting us to achieve our first working prototype w/in only one week. Ink’s customized brush texture and animation help allowed us to rapidly iterate on the stroke design.”
– Jordan Komoda, Software program Engineer, Google
We’ve additionally designed Ink API with our Android app companions’ suggestions in thoughts to verify it matches with their present app architectures and necessities.
With Ink API, constructing a pure and fluid inking expertise on Android is less complicated than ever. Ink API helps you to give attention to what differentiates your expertise moderately than on the small print of paths, meshes, and shaders. Whether or not you’re exploring inking for note-taking, photograph or doc markup, interactive studying, or one thing utterly completely different, we hope you’ll give Ink API a strive!
Get began with Ink API
Able to dive into the properly of Ink API? Try the official developer information and discover the API reference to start out constructing your next-generation inking app. We’re wanting to see the modern experiences you create!
Be aware: This alpha launch is only the start for Ink API. We’re dedicated to constantly bettering the library, including new options and functionalities based mostly in your suggestions. Keep tuned for updates and be a part of us in shaping the way forward for inking on Android!