Show HN: Wunderlist celebrates 1M Android downloads, Open Sources key UI element

From the 6Wunderkinder Android team:

When we started developing Wunderlist 2, our product design team came to us with this beautiful layer concept for Wunderlist’s Detail View. Since we strive to create a consistent Wunderlist experience for our users across all platforms, it was very important for us to have the Detail View behave the same way on Android than it does on iOS and the Web.

First, we tried to use existing open source code, but they just didn’t offer the behaviours and quality that we and the design team needed. So, equipped with a big pot of coffee and a few long nights, we worked on what is now SlidingLayer. After the launch of Wunderlist 2 we received a lot of email from Android developers that were interested in the techniques we used for the Detail View element.

It works the same as any other container on Android. For flexibility it extends from FrameLayout, so it’s as easy as to drop it inside of your XML layout and so you can adjust the parameters as usual. You tap to open, rather than sliding and you can place it on the left, right or middle. After opening, you can dismiss it by sliding it away. To make things extra simple, we introduced an auto mode within the parameter that determines which side to stick your view to. For instance setting the gravity of the SlidingLayer to the right in any container or using alignParentRight = true from within a RelativeLayout will automatically stick your SlidingLayer to the right.

We are super happy to be opening it up to the Android Community and hope to see more and more developers getting inspired to use the component in their apps.