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)

Getting Started

You might be wondering what a custom view is; that's alright, we'll cover that and way more in this book. If you've been developing Android applications for a while, you've most probably used the standard Android views or widgets tons of times. These are, for example: TextView, ImageView, Button, ListView, and so on. A custom view is slightly different. To summarize it quickly, a custom view is a view or a widget where we've implemented its behavior ourselves. In this chapter, we'll cover the very basics steps we'll need to get ourselves started building Android custom views and understand where we should use them and where we should simply rely on the Android standard widgets. More specifically, we will talk about the following topics:

  • What's a custom view and why do we need them?
  • How to set up and configure our environment to develop custom views
  • Creating our very own first custom view