Book Image

Android UI Design

By : Jessica Thornsby
Book Image

Android UI Design

By: Jessica Thornsby

Overview of this book

<p>Great design is one of the key drivers in the adoption of new applications, yet unfortunately design considerations are often neglected in the face of “will it work,” “can we make it quicker,” or “can we get more people using it”?</p> <p>This book seeks to redress this balance by showing you how to get your PM to start treating the design phase of your project seriously. This book is focused entirely on the development of UI features, and you’ll be able to practically implementing the design practices that we extol throughout the book.</p> <p>Starting by briefly outlining some of the factors you need to keep in mind when building a UI, you’ll learn the concepts of Android User Interface from scratch. We then move on to formulate a plan on how to implement these concepts in various applications. We will deep dive into how UI features are implemented in real-world applications where UIs are complex and dynamic.</p> <p>This book offers near complete coverage of UI-specific content including, views, fragments, the wireframing process, and how to add in splash screens—everything you need to make professional standard UIs for modern applications. It will then cover material design and show you how to implement Google's design aesthetic in a practical manner. Finally, it ensures the best possible user experience by analyzing the UI using various tools, and then addressing any problems they uncover.</p> <p>By the end of the book, you’ll be able to leverage the concepts of Android User Interface in your applications in order to attract new customers.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Android UI Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Processes and threads


How your app handles threads and processes has a significant impact on your app's performance. By default, when the user launches an app, the Android system creates a single thread of execution for that application. All components run in this single thread, which is known as the main thread or the UI thread.

Unless you specify otherwise, most of the operations you perform in your app run in the foreground on this main thread. Most of the time this single-thread model works fine, but if your app needs to perform particularly intensive work or long-running operations, then the main thread can become blocked. This can cause your app to freeze, display system errors, and potentially even crash.

If you're going to deliver a good user experience, then it's vital you don't block the UI thread with intensive or long-running operations. If you do need to run demanding processes, then you should create additional threads.

This involves specifying which process a certain component...