Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By : Raimon Ràfols Montane
Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By: Raimon Ràfols Montane

Overview of this book

To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices. This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions. You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them. By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Building a Charts Component

In the previous chapter, we saw how to build a complex custom view that combined a bit of everything we've covered in this book. It included some rendering code, used a third-party library, had touch interactions and animations, and we briefly talked about performance considerations. It was a rather complete custom view example, but it's not the only one. In this chapter, we'll be building another complex custom view. Step by step, we'll build a charts custom view to draw graphs we can embed in our Android applications. We'll start by building a very basic implementation and we'll be adding additional features and functionalities along the way. In more detail, we'll see about:

  • Building a basic charts component
  • How to take into account margins and padding
  • Using Paths to improve rendering
  • Updating and growing our data...