Book Image

Android User Interface Development: Beginner's Guide

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Android User Interface Development: Beginner's Guide

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

<p>There are over 30,000 applications for Android that have been downloaded over a million times already. What makes yours any different? Building a compelling user-interface that people understand and enjoy is vital for the survival of a new application in an environment where look and feel may be the only thing between a user purchasing your application; or deleting it forever.<br /><br />Working through examples, code-snippets, and screenshots this book introduces the fundamentals of good user-interface design from a developer's point of view. This book will put you above the rest by showing you how to build striking user interfaces to grasp your app users' attention enough to make them shell out some bucks to buy your application.</p> <p>The <em>Android User Interface Development Beginner's Guide</em> will tell you everything you need to know to style your applications from bottom up. Given the importance of user-interface design on a touch-screen device, this book aims to equip its reader with the knowledge required to build killer Android applications. Starting simply, and keeping things easy, this book will take you on a step-by-step journey to understanding the principals of good user-interface design, and how to implement the best user interfaces on an Android mobile device. It aims at building design understanding on a chapter-by-chapter basis, while introducing platform knowledge through examples.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Android User Interface Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 9. Styling Android Applications

Up to this point we've been working with the standard Android themes and styling. From a consistency point of view, this is a very good thing, since the application will blend properly with the device's theming (if it has any). However, there are times when you need to be able to define your own styling. This styling may only apply to a single widget, or it may apply to the entire application. In any of these cases, you'll need to know what tools you have available from Android in order to decide how best to approach the problem at hand.

There is more to styling than just making your application look good. Also, what you think would look good, another person may hate. It's also about making the application more useful to your users. This may involve making sure that your application looks right no matter which language the user chooses. It may involve additional colors for some chosen widgets, or it may simply involve implementing a landscape layout...