Book Image

Android UI Design

By : Jessica Thornsby
Book Image

Android UI Design

By: Jessica Thornsby

Overview of this book

<p>Great design is one of the key drivers in the adoption of new applications, yet unfortunately design considerations are often neglected in the face of “will it work,” “can we make it quicker,” or “can we get more people using it”?</p> <p>This book seeks to redress this balance by showing you how to get your PM to start treating the design phase of your project seriously. This book is focused entirely on the development of UI features, and you’ll be able to practically implementing the design practices that we extol throughout the book.</p> <p>Starting by briefly outlining some of the factors you need to keep in mind when building a UI, you’ll learn the concepts of Android User Interface from scratch. We then move on to formulate a plan on how to implement these concepts in various applications. We will deep dive into how UI features are implemented in real-world applications where UIs are complex and dynamic.</p> <p>This book offers near complete coverage of UI-specific content including, views, fragments, the wireframing process, and how to add in splash screens—everything you need to make professional standard UIs for modern applications. It will then cover material design and show you how to implement Google's design aesthetic in a practical manner. Finally, it ensures the best possible user experience by analyzing the UI using various tools, and then addressing any problems they uncover.</p> <p>By the end of the book, you’ll be able to leverage the concepts of Android User Interface in your applications in order to attract new customers.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Android UI Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Building your UI – XML or Java?


The easiest way of defining your user interface (and the views, ViewGroups, and layout elements that it contains) is via your project's XML file.

Declaring your UI with XML

Android provides a straightforward XML vocabulary that gives your user interface a human-readable structure, and creates a separation between the code that defines your UI and the code that controls your app's behavior. You define your layouts in XML in a dedicated layout resource file. This helps to keep both sets of code cleaner, and it gives you the ability to tweak and refine your UI without having to touch your app's underlying code. For example, you can update your layout to support an additional language without having to touch the previously-tested code.

Declaring your UI in XML also makes it easier to provide alternate layouts; for example, at some point, you may want to create an alternative version of your layout that's optimized for landscape mode. If you declare your original...