Pull to Refresh

Over the past few months I’ve been receiving a ton of emails, tweets, G+ mentions and GitHub issues in connection with my open source libraries. So I thought I would set out what my plan is for them in the future, and the order in which I’ll be tackling the backlog.

So this is my first blog post on ActionBar-PullToRefresh. I’ve been mainly talking about it on Google+ up until now as it simply was not ready for production use. Well today I tagged and push v0.4 of the project, which adds the main missing feature: automatically styling based on your Action Bar style.

Android-PullToRefresh was started about 18 months ago, as I needed it for a project (Friendcaster). Since then I’ve kept maintaining the project, pushing it forward and adding new features.

Following on from yesterday’s post about making Pull-to-Refresh more discoverable, today I’ve made it a bit more customisable. As you can see above, instead of the standard Android indeterminate spinner we have Andy spinning instead. This drawable is completely customisable by you.

Lots of evangelist Android developers dislike the Pull-to-Refresh pattern on Android. For instance Cyril Mottier wrote a whole blog post detailing his views and it’s well worth a read. The trouble with his arguments (in my opinion) is that he’s far too ‘pure’ in his views on using patterns from other platforms. For me, getting something which works well and people can use is more important than keeping to Google’s Pure Android guidelines.