I am a high school student developing an app for the SAT. Some questions will have answer choices that have only text, but some questions have answer choices that only have images. How would I solve this issue? I don't want to create an activity for each question.
Thank You so much!
Use the Design Support library.
The Design support library was created to facilitate the creation of applications that use components and behaviors characteristic of Material Design in a way compatible with versions of Android 2.1 and higher (API 7+). With it we can use components like Snackbar or FAB without having to worry (a lot) about users in older versions of Android because all the work has already been done by Google.
Related
I have an application which is designed using Material Design 2. I have not submitted that to Playstore yet.
I am now trying to upgrade that application to Material Design 3. AFAIK, the themes etc present in Material Design 3 will not work on below Android 12 devices. So, I am not able to understand how to support Material Design 2(for below Android 12) and Material Design 3(for above Android 12) in my app.
I understand that this must be some basic question but I am not sure how to achieve this. Do I submit different APKs to Playstore with MD2 and MD3 or within code, do I somehow check the version and decide what to apply?
No, you don't need to submit different versions to Google Play. Take a look at migration article from material blog.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I want to update my old android application to support material design.Currently i'm using android eclipse to develop.I have following questions.
1.What are the things to follow to upgrade my android app to material design?
2.Do i need to use Android Studio to support for material design?
3.Is there any documentation about how to design material design?
4.Up to which older version does material design support?
1.What are the things to follow to upgrade my android app to material design?
All definitions and guidelines in the Material Design site. Personally, I believe the most important are the Metrics and Keylines section, as well as the Typography section. I mean, if I were to start learning Material Design, I would start there.
Of course, all other things are useful as well. For example, you must look at the Components group, and most important (in my humble opinion), how and when to use Cards (compare to Tiles). Again, metrics and typography play a huge role here. Some other things seem to be more useful to people implementing widgets and all, i.e., system programmers and designers.
Floating Action Button (a component for promoted actions), are also going to play a huge role in Material Design.
Finally, considering this is all very new, I strongly suggest you follow well known people on Google+, and subscribe to some communities there. There are new things, code samples and open source components appearing each day, that help easing this transition. One of the cool stuff I've found recently is one (“LDrawer“) that automatically deals with the icon morphing animation for the ActionBarDrawerToggle. I don't even know if this has already been put into the support libraries (or as easily as a one line import/change), just for you to see how this is all so new. Update: it is present in the support-v7 library now. Again, everything is changing very fast.
Android App Design is a good one. Roman Nurik is the moderator. There are good stuff that pops up on Android Projects on Github, and so on…
2.Do i need to use Android Studio to support for material design?
No. But I suggest you at least try it. It's going to be the future, it has a lot of useful features, and it's the "kinda official" IDE for Android development. Everything is going to be released for it (first, or only).
I stopped following Eclipse for Android development quite some time ago, so I can't really comment on what you're missing there, but last I've heard, even one of the Googlers that really used Eclipse finally migrated a few weeks ago. Some jokes flew on Google+ because of that :), so I would take that as a hint. ;)
3.Is there any documentation about how to design material design?
See 1. If you mean the javadocs, see classes mentioned in the links posted in 4, below.
4.Up to which older version does material design support?
By using a few support libraries, you can use most of the components down to API 7 (Eclair MR1/2.1), so that means everything, in practice. Not all, but Google is certainly putting a lot of effort to backport everything as transparently as possible. IIRC, they said that in one of the I/O sessions when someone asked one of the presenters.
I say “as transparently as possible” because some things won't be there, because they depend on new stuff added in 5.0 (for example, the shadow rendering for cards). But these are, as far as I know, specific issues that don't affect development.
Indeed, here we are: 5.0 is not really in the wild yet, and we already have most stuff all the way back to v7.
To use material design in your Android apps, follow the guidelines defined in the material design specification and functionality available in Android 5.0 (API level 21)
So update android sdk to api 21.
and check this
I just started designing my app for Android L Material theme. I understand that we have to first check whether our existing apps work fine with the ART, the new WebView and all that, but going a step further I want my app to be release-ready when Android L is officially released. But I see that there's very little documentation and I'm not able to get around to find answers to some questions I have -
Is the material theme itself going to be available for older versions of Android?
Is the Android L SDK that's publicly available right now good enough to start building apps using it? I found a few posts on stack overflow where commons guy has said to hold off until Android L is released.
There are a few things that are mentioned in the design specs but there's no documentation on it. Like "Toolbar", for example, is replacing the "ActionBar" according to Google IO 2014 App's source. But why is it not mentioned anywhere in the Android L getting started page? And is it going to be backward compatible with older versions through support library?
Any sample code on how to achieve extended app bar as mentioned in this page?
Is the material theme itself going to be available for older versions of Android?
There have been some comments from Google suggesting that they'll be doing some things in this area. Not everything is strictly possible to offer in the form of a backport. Hence, we won't really know until they ship.
Is the Android L SDK that's publicly available right now good enough to start building apps using it? I found a few posts on stack overflow where commons guy has said to hold off until Android L is released.
The reason for my advice is that we have no idea how stable the L APIs are, particularly with respect to Material Design. If you want to experiment with L for that sort of thing, great! But I'd leave such stuff on a development branch until the next shipping version of Android.
But why is it not mentioned anywhere in the Android L getting started page?
There are lots of things not mentioned in the docs, particularly in API level release notes. That's normal for Android, and it is why I and others write blog posts like this one and this one.
And is it going to be backward compatible with older versions through support library?
That has not been announced. We'll find out when the next production version of Android ships.
Any sample code on how to achieve extended app bar as mentioned in this page?
I am not aware of any, though I haven't been keeping an eye out for it either. My personal aesthetic says "yuck" for that particular aspect of Material Design. :-)
Google has a great resource for Android 4.0+ Design Guidelines. But there is still a large percentage of Android users running 2.3.x.
What is the easiest way to use the latest design guidelines while still maintaining backwards compatibility with older OS versions? There are a lot of special menus and navigation tools in the guidelines that are probably Android 4.0+ only. Do they gracefully fall back to basic elements for older versions of the OS? Do you have to create a whole separate view/template for each major Android version?
What is the best approach to adopting the newest guidelines with leaving a large percentage of users out in the cold?
Use ActionBarSherlock and the HoloEverywhere libraries, as well as the Android Support libraries.
There is a support library from google (link) that ports back many of the Android 4 UI Features. You may look at the feature list on their homepage for details.
Furthermore, there is Actionbar Sherlock by Jake Wharton. This a is an extension to the Compatibility Actionbar that offers more features than the original from google. (link)
"Do you have to create a whole separate view/template for each major Android version?"
The answer for this is No, All you need is a single apk for all the Android versions,
But the UI would be changed depending on the OS version and screen size.
Android provides a number of support libraries for doing this.
The latest design guidelines are compatible only for Android 3.X (Honeycomb) and higher.
For the earlier versions, the UI would behave accordingly.
Please go through Android documentation about support libraries, and there you can find some samples too.
But if you want the same look for all the versions of Android, then you have to go for third party libraries like Actionbar Sherlock.
Considering Android Design Guidelines announcement what is the best way to make apps which are compliant with them on Android 2.x phones? E.g. what is the best way to implement the ActionBar pattern?
ActionbarSherlock is a starting point. It includes the compatibility libraries from Google and comes provided as a project rather than JAR offering greater flexibility, should you need to alter anything. Version 4 is on the way which will also include ICS stuff.
As far as I am aware I believe ABS is backward compatible to 1.6, and makes use of the minSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion. It uses an extended version of the holo theme to create a light and dark version that includes the extra ActionBar goodness, which in turn you can extend to style your app.
I recorded a tutorial on YouTube to get people started.
I think it's better to use the compatibilty libraries directly, instead of another library based on those. Additionally, refer to the Google I/O App as stated at the bottom of the first link I gave. You can find the best practices about implementing a UI for several devices with compatibility libraries.
I found ActionBarSherlock to be pretty good. It will emulate ActionBar on older devices and use the native one on modern ones. It's an extension to Android compatibility library - so you will also get fragments and other ICS stuff.