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

Supporting different screens


Android devices come in many different shapes and sizes. Your task, as a developer, is to create a UI that looks just as good on the small space available to a budget-friendly smartphone, as it does on the large space available to a top-of-the-line Android tablet and everything in between.

So let's break it down. Android categorizes screens in two ways:

  • Screen sizes: Traditionally, Android supported four generalized screen sizes: smallnormallarge, and xlarge. However, Android 3.2 (API level 13) introduced some new configuration qualifiers that allow you to be more specific about screen sizes.

  • Screen densities: A device's screen density is a combination of its resolution and display size, and is measured in dots per inch (dpi). The higher a device's dpi, the smaller each individual pixel, which means greater clarity and more detail per inch. Android supports six generalized densities: low (ldpi), medium (mdpi), high (hdpi), extra high (xhdpi), extra-extra-high...