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

Building layouts using grids


When building screens, it's common to want specific widgets to appear the same size and shape as other widgets. This is often achieved using flexible grid models for the layout. By dividing the screen into a number of cells, and having each widget occupy one or more cells, you can create very complex layouts that will stretch to any screen size. However, this traditional model is completely outdated when faced with ConstraintLayout, which is capable of maintaining complex relationships between widgets without the need for a grid.

 

In most situations, ConstraintLayout should be more than capable of managing any complex layout you choose to design, and will be much more flexible than a grid/table layout manager. Unlike a grid-based layout engine, ConstraintLayout is much more flexible when dealing with widgets that are sized based on a font or images that can be various sizes, depending on the physical screen size and pixel-density. While GridLayout will adjust...