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


Overview screens are the first thing a user will see and interact with in your application, and will be the area of the application they will spend most of their time in. It's important to keep the screen focused and opinionated on what data is displayed to the user, and how it's displayed. Always consider how long the user has to look at your screen, and what information they will need easy access to. Make use of the RecyclerView and LiveData classes to provide the user with detailed views arranged with the most important information first, and allow them to quickly scroll through their most important recent events.

It's also important to consider the navigation of your application, the various ways the user will leave your overview screen, and how they will get back to it. As far as possible, keep the Overview class responsible for just arranging the data on the screen. Any logic that takes the user away from the screen, for whatever reason, should be encapsulated in Fragment classes...