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

Simplifying your Hierarchy View


Another common cause of performance problems is your app's Hierarchy View.

When the Android system renders each view, it goes through three stages: measure, layout, and draw. The time it takes the system to complete each stage is affected by the number of views in your hierarchy, and how these views are arranged.

Arranging your views in deeper, more complex, hierarchies will have a noticeable impact on your app's rendering speed. You should be on the lookout for any opportunities to flatten your view hierarchy and remove nested layouts.

As well as highlighting areas of overdraw, Hierarchy View helps you visualize your app's view hierarchy and provides some really useful performance information about how long each view takes to render.

The Hierarchy View tool consists of three different windows.

Tree View

This window provides a bird's eye view of the currently selected Activity's view hierarchy:

Each node in Tree View represents a single View. When you select a...