Question: [Material design](http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html#introduction-principles) makes a huge emphasis on the metaphor of "sheets of paper". To make these, shadows are essential. Since Material design is a philosophy and **not an API** (despite it being built into L), this should be done anywhere (Windows Forms, HTML/CSS, etc.). **How do I do this in Android API 14 to 20?**

Note that premade PNGs won't really be that practical for circular and other non-square shapes.

Answer: 
Rendering shadows on pre-Lollipop is not easy, but possible. The trick is that a shadow is simply a black, blured shape of a view. You can do that by yourself.

1. Draw your shadow-casting view to a bitmap with LightingColorFilter(0,0) set
2. Blur it using ScriptIntrisincBlur
3. Draw the shape
4. Draw the view on top of the shape

Sounds lika a lot of code to write, but it works for all cases, so you can easily cover all your views.
The floating action button (with shadow) can be emulated on old platforms with a simple java class.

I'm using Faiz Malkani's version here: <https://github.com/FaizMalkani/FloatingActionButton>

[Note, that to get it compatible back to Gingerbread you'll need to put some SDK version checks around the animations and transparency calls in his code.]