Notification Implementation Best Practices
Article Summary
Wayne Piekarski shows how Android Wear notification pages require just ONE extra line of code. Seriously, that's it.
This 2014 Android Developers Blog post walks through implementing multi-page notifications for Android Wear using the Developer Preview. Wayne demonstrates the concept with a library book overdue tracker that displays detailed information across multiple swipeable pages on the wearable.
Key Takeaways
- Multi-page notifications use a single addPages() method call
- Each extra page is a standard NotificationCompat.Builder object
- Main notification appears on phone, extra pages only on wearable
- Example shows 6 overdue books with title and author details per page
Android Wear's notification API makes it trivial to add rich, multi-page experiences to wearables while keeping phone notifications simple.
About This Article
Getting Android Wear development environments set up was tedious. Developers had to configure support libraries correctly and work through multiple setup steps just to build wearable notification applications.
Wayne Piekarski created a step-by-step guide that covered IDE setup, installing support libraries using the Android Wear Developer Preview instructions, and adding the necessary imports like NotificationManagerCompat and WearableNotifications.
By following nine sequential steps, developers could build a complete multi-page notification example. The process went from creating a new project all the way through testing on an emulator, making it faster to prototype wearable notification features.