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)

Introduction to OpenGL ES

Android supports OpenGL ES for 3D rendering. OpenGL ES is a subset of the desktop OpenGL API implementation. On its own, Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) is a very popular cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics.

It is slightly more complex to use OpenGL ES to render our custom view than the standard Android canvas drawing primitives and, as we'll see during this chapter, it needs to be used with common sense and it won't always be the best approach.

For any additional information about OpenGL ES please refer to the official documentation from The Khronos Group:
https://www.khronos.org/opengles/.

Getting started with OpenGL ES in Android

It's very easy to create a 3D-enabled...