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.

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Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started
Getting Started
What's a custom view
Setting up the environment
Creating our own first custom view
Summary
2
Implementing Your First Custom View
Implementing Your First Custom View
Measuring and parameterizing our custom view
Instantiating custom views
Creating a custom layout
Basic rendering
Summary
3
Handling Events
Handling Events
Basic event handling
Advanced event handling
Summary
4
Advanced 2D Rendering
Advanced 2D Rendering
Drawing operations
Summary
5
Introducing 3D Custom Views
Introducing 3D Custom Views
Introduction to OpenGL ES
Drawing geometry
Summary
6
Animations
Animations
Custom-made animations
Using Android SDK Classes
Summary
7
Performance Considerations
Performance Considerations
Performance impact and recommendations
Summary
8
Sharing Our Custom View
Sharing Our Custom View
Best practices for sharing our custom view
Publishing our custom view
Summary
9
Implementing Your Own EPG
Implementing Your Own EPG
Building an EPG
Configurations and Extensions
Summary
10
Building a Charts Component
Building a Charts Component
Building a basic chart custom view
Adding advanced features
Summary
11
Creating a 3D Spinning Wheel Menu
Creating a 3D Spinning Wheel Menu
Creating an interactive 3D custom view
Beyond the basic implementation
Summary

Configurations and Extensions

If want to create a custom view that is usable by many people, it needs to be customizable. The EPG is no exception. In our initial implementation, we hardcoded some colors and values, but let's see how we can extend these functionalities and make our EPG customizable.

Making it configurable

In the initial chapters of this book, we introduced how to add parameters and, that way, easily customize our custom view. Following the same principles, we have created an attrs.xml file with all the customizable parameters:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
<resources> 
    <declare-styleable name="EPG"> 
        <attr name="backgroundColor...
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