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

Stack view


Sometimes, it's useful to be able to display long lists of items with only one item visible at a time, for example, the list of attachments for a ClaimItem. In this case, you can use the side-to-side ViewPager as you've already done, but there is another option--the StackView. The StackView class presents its contents as a three-dimensional stack of cards, with the "top" card fully visible, and some of the cards "behind it," as shown:

This is often a very useful pattern, as it provides the user with plenty of screen space to view the top item, while also being able to see that there are other items that can be viewed. This makes it ideal for displaying photos or large cards of data. It's very similar to how Android displays the list of running applications when you tap on the "Recent Apps" button on a device.

The StackView is a classic Adapter view, and works using the same Adapter implementations as ListView or GridView. If done correctly, you can write code that can be used in...