Book Image

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

Are you an Android developer with some experience under your belt? Are you wondering how the experts create efficient and good-looking apps? Then your wait will end with this book! We will teach you about different Android development patterns that will enable you to write clean code and make your app stand out from the crowd. The book starts by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different design and layout patterns and get to know the best practices of how to use them together. Then you’ll then develop an application that will help you grasp activities, services, and broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user-detecting classes and APIs such as gesture detection, touch screen listeners, and sensors to your app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, auto, and TV. Finally, you will see how to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns as well as the best publishing and monetizing practices. The book will start by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different Design and layout patterns and learn the best practices on how to use them together. You will then develop an application that will help you grasp Activities, Services and Broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user detecting classes and APIs such as at gesture detection, touch screen listeners and sensors to our app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, Auto, and TV. Finally, you will learn to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns and best publishing and monetizing practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Android Design Patterns and Best Practice
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

List item layouts


It is very tempting to use a card view to display individual items in a list, and one can find many examples of it being used like this. However This practice is not recommended by Google and for good reason. Cards are designed to display content of non-uniform size and the rounded edges and shadows only serve to clutter up the screen. When list items are all the same size and conform to the same layout, then they should appear as simple rectangular layouts, sometimes with a simple divider separating them.

We will be creating complex, interactive list items later in the book, so for now we will just have an image and a string as our item view.

Create a layout file with a horizontal linear layout as its root and place these two views inside it:

<ImageView 
    android:id="@+id/item_image" 
    android:layout_width="@dimen/item_image_size" 
    android:layout_height="@dimen/item_image_size" 
    android:layout_gravity="center_vertical|end" 
    android...