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

Chapter 3. Taking Actions

Handling events is an essential part of any application; they are the raw input data for a user interface and how we interact with our users (rather than just presenting them with data). Android has an event model that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has programmed Java on their desktop--you attach listener objects to the widgets, and they deliver events to you.

Event listeners in Android take the form of interfaces that you need to implement in order to receive the events. Each possible event type is declared as a method on the relevant interface. To receive a notification that the user has clicked or tapped on a widget, you use the OnClickListener interface, which declares a method--onClick(View)--which will be invoked when the relevant widget receives what it considers a click gesture from the user.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at events on Android, and how best to implement them. Specifically, we'll be taking a closer look at the following:

  • How Android...