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)

Summary

In this chapter, we've seen how to create very basic custom views using OpenGL ES. OpenGL ES adds a lot of possibilities when creating custom views, but it also adds a lot of complexity if we don't have that much experience working with it. We could cover many more chapters on this topic, but that is not the main goal of this book. We'll have some more examples of using 3D custom views, but there is a lot of published material on how to learn, or even master, OpenGL ES on Android devices.

In the next chapter, we'll see how to add more animations and smooth movements to our custom view. As we could animate any parameter or variable, it will not matter if it is a 3D custom view or a standard 2D custom view, but we'll see how to apply animations in both cases.