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)

Implementing Your Own EPG

So far, we have been building very basic examples to show some of the functionalities and methods that Android provides us with to implement and draw our custom views. In this chapter, we will see a more complex example of a custom view. We'll be building an Electronic Programming Guide (EPG).

An EPG is a fairly complex component to build, and if done wrong, can have an impact on the user experience. For example, if it doesn't perform well, it'll feel sluggish and tedious to use.

We'll be using several things we have covered in previous chapters. All together it can be a bit too much, but we will be building it step by step, and, in more detail, we will cover:

  • How to build a basic EPG custom view
  • How to add basic animations and interactions
  • How to allow zooming
  • Making it configurable
...