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)

Measuring and parameterizing our custom view

In order to have a good reusable custom view, it needs to be able to adapt to different sizes and device resolutions, and to increase its reusability even more it should support parameterization.

Measuring our custom view

In the quick example we built in the previous chapter, we delegated all sizes and measurement to the parent view itself. To be honest, we haven't even delegated it; we just didn't do anything specifically to take care of that. Being able to control the size and dimensions of our custom view is something we definitely need to pay some attention to. To start, we're going to override the onMeasure() method from view as follows:

@Override 
protected...