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

Creating themes and styles


Now that you've made some decisions regarding the finer details of your UI, it's time to think about how you might implement them. This is where themes and styles come in useful, as they're one of the quickest and easiest ways of implementing design decisions consistently across your views, activities, and even your entire application.

Once you've made these design decisions, it's a good idea to create styles and perhaps even a theme to help you implement your designs easily and consistently.

Styles and themes are essentially the same thing: a collection of properties. These properties can be anything from the color of your text, to the size of an ImageView, or even the "wrap_content" attribute. The difference isn't how you create this collection of properties, but how you apply them to your project:

  • Styles are the groups of properties that control what a view looks like; for example, you might apply a style to a TextView to specify the size and color of all the text...