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

Wrapping up the category picker


The category picker you created for the CaptureClaimActivity is just a group of widgets in a card right now, and while it's one of the simplest cards to use on the screen, it's also one of the largest by the amount of code written for it. The best way to encapsulate this part of the screen is to move the layout that appears inside the CardView into a Fragment class.

However, why a Fragment class, and why not write another Layout class? Fragment classes are self-contained systems, and have their own life cycle within the context of their parent Activity. This means they can contain significantly more application logic, and can be reused more easily in other parts of the application. It's also because in this case, we rely on the IDs of the radio buttons to know what has been checked by the user, which means that we can very easily start polluting layouts with IDs specific to this specific widget. Fragment classes don't stop this from happening, but it's expected...