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, you learned some of the practical techniques for breaking your user interface and application into modular components that can be reused. It's always a good idea to start with the finished user interface and break it up, preferably from the mockup stage. It's also good to identify where some parts of the system can serve multiple roles, for example, being both a read-only display and an editor. It's also a good idea to wrap components within other components, even if it's just conceptually. Keeping certain types of event handlers as their own modules makes them reusable over screens that don't share exactly the same widgets, but need to reuse the same logic.

When building user interfaces, it's a good idea to use an Activity to just wrap a collection of Fragment rather than nesting the screen logic in the Activity. This will allow the Fragment to take on specific responsibilities (such as attachments), making them more reusable elsewhere in your application. It also...