What would be a good way to show activity title without actionbar? - android

Im making an app for android, without actionbar.
What is best practice for showing titles without actionbar?

The best practice is basically never using an action bar. This gives you a complete device screen to play with.
You can use images or different text styles for showing the title. You can also use interesting icons.
To remove action bar -
Go to res > values > styles.xml
Here is an illustration of styles file -

You can use the Toolbar (it's like the action bar, but more flexible). For example, action bar needs to be on top of the screen, but toolbar can have place anywhere in the layout.
You title can be shown as text or a beautiful asset.
If, for some reason, you don't want to use the toolbar, you can think about something like having a scrollView with the title on top of it.

Use a regular LinearLayout with a TextView inside. Style according to your needs, and set the text in the xml, or programmaticaly using TextView's setText() method.

Related

ConstraintLayout in Android Studio - overlapping title bar, but title bar doesn't appear in design view or XML

So, if you build an app in Android Studio, you can of course use ConstraintLayout. I set the constraints, but often find that when I actually launch the app, the content is under the title bar at the top. But the title bar isn't apparently something you can access while designing (either in Design or Text view of the layout).
Is there a good way of avoiding this? Making sure that you don't overlap the title bar on devices?
Yes, use fitSystemWindows flag or xml property in main view.

How to position the elements in a custom action bar layout in Android?

I need to develop a custom layout for the action bar in Android.
I'm now stuck because I have no clue how to calculate the available space for my custom layout.
In the image, the red part is my custom layout, the blue part is the space occupied by the action buttons.
Clearly I need to know/calculate the size of the red part to be able to correctly position the elements in my custom action bar (for example center the title in the window or make sure not to overflow in the blue part).
How can I achieve this?
I couldn't find useful examples or a clear API in the Android documentation.
I think that anyone using the custom action bar layout must be facing this kind of problem, I'm a bit confused.
Or am I supposed not to use action buttons in this case? Perhaps I'm supposed to replicate the action buttons by myself?
Thanks in advance
Try using ToolBar instead of ActionBar. It will give you a lot more control over ActionBar elements than ActionBar.
Here is a simple tutorial about how to replace ActionBar with ToolBar and how you can customise it.
Material ToolBar
Possibilities are endless with ToolBar but my recommendation is to don't overdo anything.
As per my suggestion try to use the entire action bar by your custom layout. So that you can arrange all the things use it as a fragment inside a framelayout for all your screens so that the code can be reused for all your layouts.

Separator between icon and text action bar

I need to display a separator between the logo and text on the action bar. Is it possible to set this via styles?
P.S: My minSdk is 14, so I use system Holo elements.
I am not sure you can achieve this with the style. Generally the dividers are made for the MenuItem. A simplest way to do it, it's to add manually your divider inside your icon app and keep the width unchanged.

ActionBar in android at bottom

I want to put an action bar with 4 clickable entities, on the bottom of the activity. I should be able to associate each of the 4 entities/buttons with intents. Can anyone please tell me the xml file and the java code for this. I am not able to find this anywhere.
You can try a SplitActionBar but in general it is recommended that the ActionBar be at the top and contactual actions go in the bottom bar.
Alternatively you can try playing with the gravity layout parameter as shown here, though I have not tried this and would advise against it.

Custom title bar vs. layout with header

I recently thought of adding a custom title bar to my app (with "find me" and home button and such) and then I thought what is the reason of using a custom title bar at top instead of just a normal layout and using it as an include tag at the top of my XML's
What are the pros and cons of each? Is there realy a difference?
EDIT: one difference ive found so far is that the custom title bar has a shadows automaticly
For having back and home button titlebar, you should define normal layout for the same. Because it is easy to implement as compared to customized the native title bar. And we can create normal layout as we wants with any color/height/width/image backround/etc.
I suggest you to go with defining normal layout for the title bar instead of customizing the native title bar.
You can extend LinearLayout to create a new layout with your title bar. The advantage is you can then customise the title bar for different activities that use it. Some may not want to display the find button for instance.
If you use include in XML you don't have the same flexibility.
I would create a custom layout with the title bar.

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