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

Looking at material structure


Material layouts have a selection of patterns that applications should follow for every screen they build. This sort of template is often called the scaffolding, and for mobile, it looks like this:

What is important about the scaffolding is that while it defines the basic layout of virtually every screen, it doesn't define how you should achieve this design, and even on Android, you'll find that there are several different ways of creating a screen with the preceding layout structure. Several elements are also optional: the Bottom Bar and floating action button are often left out because they aren't useful to a screen. The App Bar appears on most screens, but can be much larger and can also be folded away to provide the user with more reading space in the content area.

It's also important to understand that by default, the platform theming will put the App Bar (presented by the ActionBar class) into an Activity for you; it's also common to create your own App...