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

Handling events from other activities


On Android, you'll often find that you want to send your user to another Activity to do something, and then return them to your current Activity with the result of that action. Good examples are having the user pick a contact, or take a photo with the camera app. In these cases, Android uses a system of special events that are built into the Activity class. For capturing travel expense claims, your user needs to be able to go select a file to attach things such as photos or email attachments to their claim.

In order to present them with a familiar file chooser (and avoid writing a file chooser ourselves), you'll need to use this mechanism. However, to read files from outside of your application's private space, you'll need it to ask the user for permissions. Anytime an application needs access to potentially sensitive data (public directories, the device's camera or microphones, contact list, and so on), you need permission from the user. In versions...