Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By : Kyle Merrifield Mew
Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By: Kyle Merrifield Mew

Overview of this book

<p>Android is a mobile operating system that runs on a staggering number of smartphones and tablets. Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications written using the Java programming language. Among the number of books that have been published on the topic, what&rsquo;s missing is a thoroughly practical, hands-on book that takes you straight to getting your job done without boring you with too much theory.<br /><br />Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook will take you straight to the information you need to get your applications up and running. This book is written to provide you with the shortest possible route between an idea and a working application. <br /><br />Work through the book from start to finish to become an Android expert, or use it as a reference book by applying recipes directly to your project.<br /><br />This book covers every aspect of mobile app development, starting with major application components and screen layout and design, before moving on to how to manage sensors such as internal gyroscopes and near field communications. Towards the end, it delves into smartphone multimedia capabilities as well as graphics and animation, web access, and GPS. <br /><br />Whether you are writing your first app or your hundredth, this is a book that you will come back to time and time again, with its many tips and tricks on the rich features of Android 3.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Turning a style into a theme


A consistent visual design can be generated by applying a style to an entire activity or even to a whole application. This is done by including an android:theme attribute in the manifest.xml file, rather than in main.xml or another layout file. Styles applied in this way are referred to as themes, but are defined using the same <resources> and <style> tags and in the same location.

Once applied, an Android theme will change the properties of all views in its specified activity or application.

Getting ready

Themes are defined in the same resource folder as styles, so start a new Android project with Eclipse and navigate to the res/values folder in the Package Explorer.

How to do it...

  1. In the res/values folder, create a new XML file as we did in the last recipe.

  2. Call the file my_theme.xml and fill it out as follows:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <resources>
    
      <style name="MyTheme">
        <item name="android:textSize">20dip...