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

Re-using layouts with > and <merge/>


The Android platform provides a range of simple, reusable UI components known as widgets, but sometimes there may be larger or more complex UI components that you need to reuse across multiple screens, such as a panel containing a progress bar and a Cancel button, or a user profile consisting of a username and an avatar.

If your project features elements that you want to use multiple times, you can save yourself time and effort by implementing these elements as a reusable layout. You can then import these reusable elements into as many layout files as you want, using Android's > and <merge/> tags.

To extract common elements into a reusable layout, create a new XML layout resource file and then define the UI elements you want to reuse. Pay special attention to the file's root view as this will also be included every time you embed this component in other layouts.

To import your reusable component into a layout resource file, just add the...