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 an EPG

If we want to make our EPG useful, it should show several channels, and both current and future TV programs at the same time. Also, it'd be nice to clearly see what's currently playing, and have clear indicators of when other TV programs start and end.

In this specific component, we will opt for one method of rendering that covers these points. You can use it as an example, but there are many other ways to render the same kind of information. Also, it won't be connected to a backend service providing the EPG data. All EPG data will be mocked up, but it can be easily connected to any service, although some changes might need to be done.

EPG basics and animation setup

We'll start by creating...