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)

Publishing our custom view

Once we're happy with our custom view and the way it is, we're ready to share it. If we've also followed the best practices and recommendations, we might be additionally confident. Even if you haven't, the best way to learn is to get feedback from the community as soon as possible. Don't be afraid of making mistakes; you'll learn on the way.

There are many ways of publishing a custom view: we can open source it, for example, or we can just publish a compiled binary as a SDK or Android library. Most of the recommendations above are given for the open source approach or internal reuse, either for yourself or your colleagues, but many of them, not all, also apply if your goal is to publish a closed SDK or just the compiled binary as a library.

...