Your UI is your most direct communication with your users, but all too often in app development, design is an afterthought, or something that "just happens" along the way.
In order to develop a great app, you need to take your UI design seriously. Even if your app delivers great functionality, if its user interface is clunky, laggy, difficult to navigate, or just an all-around eyesore, then no one is going to want to use it.
Android isn't the easiest platform to design for. Creating an app that looks great across countless different devices, all with different combinations of hardware, software, and screens, is no mean feat. But if you put some thought into the design process, you can create a UI that delivers a great experience across the entire Android ecosystem.
This book will help you become a design-minded developer. Over the course of 10 chapters, you'll learn how to design, refine, test, and develop an effective, engaging UI that people will love using and that delivers the best possible experience regardless of device specifics.
From the fundamentals of layouts and views right through to creating responsive, multi-pane layouts, and from sketching your screens, through to using Android Studio's tools to scrutinise your view hierarchy and hunt out memory leaks, this book covers everything you need to create the perfect Android UI.
Chapter 1, Introducing the Android UI, explains why designing and developing an effective UI is essential to the success of your app.
Chapter 2 , What Goes into an Effective UI?, teaches you how to master the building blocks of every Android UI: layouts and views. Learn how to create and style common UI components including text, images, and buttons.
Chapter 3 , Expanding your UI – Fragments, Resources, and Gathering User Input, helps you take your UI to the next level using arrays, dimensions, state lists, and 9-patch images. Using fragments, you'll learn how to create a flexible UI that reacts to the user's specific screen size.
Chapter 4 , Getting Started with Material Design, teaches you how to master Google's new design principles and delight your users with a UI that feels like a seamless extension of the Android operating system.
Chapter 5 , Turning Your Bright Idea into a Detailed Sketch, helps you become a design-minded developer by introducing roadmaps, flowcharts, screen lists, and screen maps to your Android app "To Do" list.
Chapter 6 , Turning Your Sketches into Wireframes, shows you how to transform the high-level plans from the previous chapter into detailed screen designs using paper prototypes and wireframes.
Chapter 7 , Building a Prototype, put your plan to the test! By the end of this chapter, you'll have created a complete digital prototype.
Chapter 8 , Reach a Wider Audience – Supporting Multiple Devices, teaches you how to attract a wider audience with an app that supports a wide range of hardware, software, screen sizes, screen densities, orientations, versions of the Android platform, and even different languages.
Chapter 9 , Optimizing Your UI, shows you how to create a smooth and responsive UI that people will love using. If your app is laggy, prone to crashing, gobbles up data and memory, or drains the user's battery, then no one is going to want to use it!
Chapter 10, Best Practices and Securing Your Application, guides you through putting the finishing touches to your UI, including using notifications from the upcoming Android N release.
If you are a Java developer with a keen interest in building stunning Android UIs for your applications in order to retain customers and create great experiences for them, then this book is for you. A good knowledge of XML and some grounding in Android development is assumed.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent">
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<LinearLayout
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent">Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd /Users/username/Downloads/android/sdk/platform-tools
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
For this book we have outlined the shortcuts for the Mac OX platform if you are using the Windows version you can find the relevant shortcuts on the WebStorm help page https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/help/keyboard-shortcuts-by-category.html.
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