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

Designing Android compliant menu icons


The menu items we defined in the previous recipe had only text titles to identify them to the user, however nearly all Icon Menus that we see on Android devices combine a text title with an icon. Although it is perfectly possible to use any graphic image as a menu icon, using images that do not conform to Android's own guidelines on icon design is strongly discouraged, and Android's own development team are particularly insistent that only the subscribed color palette and effects are used. This is so that these built-in menus which are universal across Android applications provide a continuous experience for the user.

Here we examine the colors and dimensions prescribed and also examine how to provide the subsequent images as system resources in such a way as to cater for a variety of screen densities.

Getting ready

The little application we put together in the last recipe makes a good starting point for this one. Most of the information here is to do...