Announcing FreeFlow

This week I announced FreeFlow, a UI framework for Android, that I lead the development on at Comcast for the last 6 months or so. The project started after repeated frustrations in building truly unconventional layouts in Android. Most of the times, developers end up hacking the default Layouts in terrible ways trying to get layouts like the designers I work with come up with. Another problem with such layout nesting is that layout animations are next to impossible to get working right.

FreeFlow solves these problems by separating the layout logic from the core View containers (ViewGroups). The idea is very similar to UICollectionViews in iOS. Additionally as layouts are transitioned or data changed, the developer gets full control over the transition animations. The video below shows some of the kind of effects that FreeFlow enables:

The library was announced 3 days ago on Google+ and Twitter. Its exciting to see that in a very short time, the project has been starred over 600 times, forked over 50 times and is seeing some initial contributions back already. I also just started a Google+ community for developers looking for help or offering feedback to the the project.

Its also exciting that this is Comcast’s first Android open source project, and that we now have a process to do that. Of course that leads to some interesting comments on Twitter. The one below might be my favorite conversation thread:

I am excited to see where FreeFlow could go in the future. Its already solving a core need in internal Comcast projects and hopefully will lead to a new breed of interactive applications on the Android platform.

I’m psyched!

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur