Book Image

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

Are you an Android developer with some experience under your belt? Are you wondering how the experts create efficient and good-looking apps? Then your wait will end with this book! We will teach you about different Android development patterns that will enable you to write clean code and make your app stand out from the crowd. The book starts by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different design and layout patterns and get to know the best practices of how to use them together. Then you’ll then develop an application that will help you grasp activities, services, and broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user-detecting classes and APIs such as gesture detection, touch screen listeners, and sensors to your app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, auto, and TV. Finally, you will see how to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns as well as the best publishing and monetizing practices. The book will start by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different Design and layout patterns and learn the best practices on how to use them together. You will then develop an application that will help you grasp Activities, Services and Broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user detecting classes and APIs such as at gesture detection, touch screen listeners and sensors to our app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, Auto, and TV. Finally, you will learn to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns and best publishing and monetizing practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Android Design Patterns and Best Practice
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Linear layouts


Choosing between a relative layout and a linear one is normally very simple. If your components line up from side to side on top of each other, then a linear layout is the obvious choice. Although it is quite possible to nest view groups, for more complex layouts, the relative version is often the best choice. This is largely because nesting layouts is resource hungry and deep hierarchies should be avoided where possible. The relative layout can be used to create a huge number of intricate layouts with very little need for nesting.

Whichever form best suits our needs, once we begin testing our layouts on screens of different shapes, or even rotate a screen through 90°, we soon see that all the thought that we put into creating components with pleasing proportions is lost. Very often, these issues can be remedied by positioning elements using gravity properties and scaling them with the weight property.

Weight and gravity

Being able to set position and proportion without having...