Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Activity Lifecycle

Introducing dividers


In order to introduce dividers into the claim overview screen, you'll need to run a second pass over the data being delivered from the Room database layer, and figure which items require a divider. This should be done on a background worker thread, so that larger datasets won't impact the user experience. Let's get to work and add some simple dividers to the travel claim app to appear between claim items made on different days; this will require some major changes to how the ClaimItemAdapter class works. The most obvious change is that it will now have a List of DisplayItem objects instead of directly containing a List of ClaimItem objects.

Follow these steps to restructure the ClaimItemAdapter to use DisplayItem objects to mix both claim items and dividers in the RecyclerView:

  1. First, you'll need a nice line that you can use as a divider. This will be a drawable that can be rendered using an ImageView widget. Right-click on the res/drawable directory and select New|Drawable...