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

Creating the DatePickerLayout


Each of these areas can easily be encapsulated in a Java class and reused elsewhere in your application. In Chapter 3, Taking Actions, you wrote the DatePickerWrapper class, which can turn any TextView widget into a date selection widget. However, DatePickerWrapper doesn't create the TextView label or change the styling of the widgets to look like TextInputLayout. This means that you need to copy that styling into each layout where you want a date-picker, which can quickly lead to inconsistencies in your user interface. While it's good to have the events and state decoupled from the display logic, it would also be nice to have them grouped together in a single structure that can be reused without every layout having to specify the date picker widgets by hand, and then bind them to the DatePickerWrapper in its code.

While it's not obvious at first, the Android layout XML files can reference any View class and not just those defined in the core and support packages...