Compose for Wear OS <1.4.0-alpha02> was released t...

# compose-wear

[stevebower]

Compose for Wear OS 1.4.0-alpha02 was released this week. We made a couple of bug fixes: in SwipeToReveal, it was possible to interact with (and cancel) a committed action on one item by starting to swipe another item; ListHeader now supports height adjustments when contents need extra height to accommodate large font sizes. Also, our 1.0.0-alpha17 of the Material3 library was released, with some API changes to colors and performance improvements. Please see the release notes for full details.

[florent]

Is it on purpose that there is still no scaffold and timetext into wear material3?

[stevebower]

TimeText is one of the next components on the roadmap and Scaffold after that. Note that the Material3 library is still very much subject to change while we build out the components.

[florent]

Ah ok and there is still a release on that artifact so you can say on your annual review look our team have made X amount of release, I get it now 😉 . It is just a bit confusing from an external point of view

[Ashley Ingram]

We work in the open for all our AndroidX libraries simple smile. You’ll see quite a few alphas get released as we iterate on the component set and visual design language for Material 3. It’s going to be an area of significant investment for the team this year, so there will likely be pretty regular alphas.

We follow standard AndroidX versioning (https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/versions), so I wouldn’t recommend relying on alpha releases. We will likely change the visual design & the API so there will be breaking changes. When we’re feature complete, we’ll move the library to beta (at which point it should be more or less ready to adopt for production software).

Of course, it’s great to get the feedback from alpha releases too! It’s definitely “early-adopter” territory though.

[florent]

I get that but if you don't provide the basics components then nobody can use the alphas and therefore we can't really give you any feedbacks. I use alpha version all the time because I found it easier to deal with incremental changes (even if it breaks stuff) rather than in big bang refactor. Moreover the more you are gonna build alpha version the less you are gonna be confident on a beta release, I have seen that so much time

[louiscad]

@Ashley Ingram
Are there components that you already know won't change?

Will there be any facility to help us migrate from material2 to material3 when it's out?

[Ashley Ingram]

We’ll try to avoid API changes wherever we can (we don’t want to break people unnecessarily, even between alphas!), but our UX team are still actively working on the spec so it’s hard to be 100% sure. For example, I’m not aware of any plans to change the buttons that are there at the moment, though I think some new types of buttons might be added

[louiscad]

Makes sense, thanks for the update, Ashley!