Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Activity Lifecycle

Exploring form screens


While not the most glamorous component of an application's user experience, form screens are a long-time staple of software. A form screen can be defined as any screen where the user is expected to explicitly enter or change data, as opposed to viewing or navigating it. Good examples of form screens are login screens, edit profile screens, or the add contact screen from a phonebook app. Over the years, the idea of what constitutes a good form screen has changed, with some people going as far as to shun them completely. However, you can't capture the user's data out of thin air.

The Android standard toolkit provides an excellent and diverse collection of widgets and layout structures to facilitate building excellent forms, and in Material Design applications, form screens can often double as a view screen (what will usually be a read-only version of the form screen) thanks to the placement of labels. A good way to understand this principle is to consider the evolution...