Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By : Raimon Ràfols Montane
Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By: Raimon Ràfols Montane

Overview of this book

To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices. This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions. You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them. By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introducing 3D Custom Views

In previous chapters, we've seen how to implement custom views using the Android 2D graphics library. That would be our most common approach, but sometimes, we might need some more horsepower because of additional render particularities or the requirements of our custom view. In those cases, we might use OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES) and enable 3D rendering operations in our view.

In this chapter, we'll see how to use OpenGL ES in our custom views and show a practical example of how we can build one. With more detail, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introduction to OpenGL ES
  • Drawing geometry
  • Loading external geometry