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

Creating the data model


At this point in the application, it's time to build a simple data model that the user interface will back onto. Each claim will be represented by a ClaimItem object, and will contain any number of Attachment objects, each of which will reference the File that was attached, and have a marker to help decide how the attachment should be previewed. All these classes will need to be Parcelable, because they need to be saved in the CaptureClaimActivity. The CaptureClaimActivity will also use them as input and output parameters, and any time an object needs to be passed as a parameter to or from an Activity, it needs to be Parcelable.

You'll also be creating a Category enum that links the Android IDs to an internal model that can be stored without having to worry about the Android IDs changing their values as the application evolves.

Creating the Attachment class

The Attachment class represents files that have been attached to a ClaimItem by the user. These should always be...