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 modular layout


So far, you've built a single Activity class with a layout composed out of two layout files containing widgets. This is a pretty normal state of affairs, but it's not the best situation. Like in most user interfaces, the claim capturing screen can be divided into a range of very logical areas:

In an Android user interface, you always have the individual widgets (such as Button, TextView, ImageView, and friends) at the bottom level, and Activity at the top level, but when you look at that screen mockup, you can instantly see that the screen can be divided into other layers in between Activity and widget. You can, of course, take each of the CardView layouts from this screen and place them in their own layout XML files, and then import them:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- card_claim_capture_info.xml -->
<android.support.v7.widget.CardView
   xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
   xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com...