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

Designing a layout


Good user interface design is rooted in some simple rules, and there are processes you can follow to design a great user interface. For example, imagine that you're building an app to capture travel expenses so that they can be claimed easily at a later time. The foremost thing we'll build over here is the screen that captures the details of a single claim. This is a perfect example of a modern form screen design.

Note

When designing a layout, it's a good idea to use a mockup tool such as Balsamiq (https://balsamiq.com/), or even paper and pencil to think about the layout of the screen. Physical index cards make excellent thinking spaces as they have similar proportions to a phone or tablet. Using paper, especially, helps you think about the arrangement of the screen instead of being distracted by the exact colors, fonts, and spacing that should be dealt with in a common set of theming rules.

To start designing the screen, we need to consider what data we'll need from the...