Posted by Chris Assigbe – Developer Relations Engineer and Tom Buckley – Product Supervisor
With stylus enter, Android apps on telephones, foldables, tablets, and Chromebooks change into much more highly effective instruments for productiveness and creativity. Whereas there’s already rather a lot to consider when designing for big screens – see our full steering and inspiration gallery – styluses are particularly impactful, reworking these units right into a digital pocket book or sketchbook. Customers anticipate stylus experiences to really feel as fluid and pure as writing on paper, which is why Android beforehand added APIs to cut back inking latency to as little as 4ms; just about imperceptible. Nevertheless, latency is only one facet of an inking expertise – builders at the moment have to 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 important 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 simple to create, render, and manipulate lovely ink strokes, enabling builders to construct wonderful 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 technique to outline the visible type of strokes, together with coloration, measurement, and the kind of device to attract with.
- Rendering module: Effectively shows ink strokes on the display, 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 suitable with units working Android 5.0 (API stage 21) or later, and presents advantages on all of those units. It might probably additionally reap the benefits of latency enhancements in Android 10 (API 29) and improved rendering results and efficiency in Android 14 (API 34).
Why select Ink API?
Ink API offers an out-of-the-box implementation for fundamental inking duties so you’ll be able to create a singular drawing expertise in your personal app. Ink API presents a number of benefits over a totally 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 means that you can 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, Maintain, and Classroom. For Circle to Search, the Ink API modular design empowered the staff to make the most of solely the parts they wanted. They leveraged the reside authoring and brush capabilities of Ink API to render a gorgeous stroke as customers circle (to look). The staff additionally constructed customized geometry instruments tailor-made to their ML fashions. That’s modularity at its best.
“Ink API was our first alternative for Circle-to-Search (CtS). Using their intensive 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 have now additionally designed Ink API with our Android app companions’ suggestions in thoughts to ensure 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 permits you to give attention to what differentiates your expertise moderately than on the small print of paths, meshes, and shaders. Whether or not you might be exploring inking for note-taking, photograph or doc markup, interactive studying, or one thing utterly totally different, we hope you’ll give Ink API a strive!
Get began with Ink API
Able to dive into the effectively of Ink API? Try the official developer information and discover the API reference to start out constructing your next-generation inking app. We’re desirous to see the modern experiences you create!
Word: This alpha launch is only the start for Ink API. We’re dedicated to repeatedly bettering the library, including new options and functionalities primarily based in your suggestions. Keep tuned for updates and be part of us in shaping the way forward for inking on Android!
