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)

Sharing Our Custom View

We've been building our custom view, or many of them, in these last chapters. We've seen how to interact with them, how to draw 2D and 3D primitives, and we want somebody else to be able to use it. That is a great idea! It might be for ourselves, we might reuse it in a future project, or it might be a project by one of our colleagues. If we aim higher, it might be a project by the Android community.

One of the things that makes the Android community awesome is that there are lots of open source libraries. All these contributions by developers have helped many other developers get started in Android development, learn to get a deeper understanding of some concepts, or be able to build their applications in the first place.

Firstly, publishing your custom view or, for instance, an Android library, is one of the methods that contributes to this amazing...