Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By : Raimon Ràfols Montane
Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By: Raimon Ràfols Montane

Overview of this book

To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices. This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions. You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them. By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Building a basic chart custom view

Most probably, at one point or another, we'll have to draw some charts in an Android application. It can be a static chart, which isn't that fun as it can be replaced simply by an image, or it can be a dynamic chart, allowing user interactions and reactions to data changes. This last case is where we can use a custom view to draw real-time graphs, add multiple sources of data, and even animate it. Let's start by building a very simple custom view where we'll add more features later on.

Margins and padding

As with any normal view, our custom view will be subject to the layout manager's margins and to the view's padding. We should not worry that much about the...