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

Creating the Overview activity


The travel claim example app needs a nice overview activity to tie together the allowance overview, a list of the claim items, and a way for the user to create new claim items. As we have a Room database, things can become significantly more decoupled, and that's a really good thing. Having a central reactive source of data allows different parts of your application to always reflect the actual state of the application as it changes, without having to coordinate with each other.

The first part of building the OverviewActivity is creating the Activity class itself and populating it with the claim items that the user has entered. Follow these steps to create a skeleton OverviewActivity and register it as the main Activity for the application:

  1. Start by right-clicking on your main package (that is, com.packtpub.claim) and selecting New |Activity |Empty Activity from the menu.
  1. Name the new class OverviewActivity.
  2. Leave all the other fields as their defaults and select...