What is slidingmenu?

SlidingMenu is an Android library that lets developers add a slide-out navigation menu to their apps. The style became popular in apps like Facebook, YouTube, and Google+ in the early 2010s: the main screen slides sideways to reveal a menu panel hidden behind it. This library packages that interaction pattern so developers can add it to their own apps without writing the animation and touch-handling code from scratch. The README lists several well-known apps that used this library, including Foursquare, LinkedIn, Evernote Food, VLC for Android, Wunderlist 2, and The Verge, giving a sense of how widely it was adopted during its active period. There are three ways to use it in a project. You can attach the sliding menu to an existing screen with a few lines of code, you can make your screen extend a special base class the library provides, or you can drop the sliding menu directly into a layout file as a standard view component. The third approach is the most flexible and lets you place the sliding menu inside other containers. The library offers a number of configuration options, including which direction the menu slides from, how much of the original screen stays visible when the menu is open, whether a shadow appears between the two layers, and how the background panel scrolls relative to the foreground. These are set either in code or through XML attributes in a layout file. The project is Java-based and was designed for Android development using the Eclipse IDE with an older project structure. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Note that Android development tooling and UI patterns have changed significantly since this library was widely used, so it may not be the current standard approach for slide-out menus.