Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Activity Lifecycle

Summary


In this chapter, we largely focused on the RecyclerView and how to make it work even better within your application, and especially for overview/dashboard screens. Changes such as adding the dividers and animations don't change the functionality of an application, but they do change the user experience. In this case, they make it easier for the user to understand the screen and easier for them to understand what happened when things changed.

These sorts of changes can be seen as "polishing" the application. You can build the application without them to ensure that everything works, and then add them in afterward. It's a good idea to slowly build a list of generic structures that can be used to quickly polish any application. A good example will be a generic ActionCommand to use the DiffUtil and apply the changes to an Adapter.

In the next chapter, we'll spend some more time on polishing applications. We'll look at animations, colors, and styling, and explore how to define and use them...