Develop Reference

How to make an initial screen to fit every mobile screen or support multiscreens

I am working on an android project. My first screen consists of one imageview and three textviews everything is clearly visible when the mobile positioned vertically if the mobile positioned horizontally then some text views are not visible how to make my app which fits to screen and supports all positions(vertical/horizontal).
Thank you.

You need to add a ScrollView to your layout. As in landscape the screen height is decreased, so lesser area is left to show elements.
ScrollView will manage all the things for you. If space available is less than required then Scroll bar will be shown otherwise not.

If you are sure that it will fit on any screen size, consider using RelativeLayout, with this you can say where it needs to align on the screen at all times. Of course if it can overflow than using a Scrollview is a much safer option.

You can use a scrollview to fit the screen in length, or you can use PercentRelativeLayout.
How to use a scrollview:
<ScrollView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:fillViewport="true">
<TableLayout
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:stretchColumns="1">
<--yourcodehere-->
</TableLayout>
</ScrollView>
Add this to your gradle to use PercentRelativeLayout:
compile 'com.android.support:percent:23.2.0'
Then you can use it like this:
<Button
android:text="#string/Tesksten"
android:id="#+id/btContent"
android:layout_below="#+id/searchView"
android:drawableTop="#drawable/ic_menu"
android:layout_width="0dp"
android:layout_height="0dp"
app:layout_heightPercent="16%"
app:layout_widthPercent="100%"
android:padding="10dp"
android:textColor="#000000"
android:background="#f0f0f0"
android:textStyle="bold"
android:alpha="0.65"
android:layout_marginBottom="10dp"/>
This is how this button looks now, note that there are more lines to get MY specific layout, remove if needed. Make sure you put Width And height to 0 and then use Percent, i had some problems figuring it out at first to. Goodluck.:
Or if you want to fully turn off screen rotation, add this to your manifest activity, that you dont want to rotate:
android:screenOrientation="portrait"

Android fixed background image in scrollview while scrolling

I have a situation where I need a scrollview to have a background image that shouldn't scroll along with it's parent when moving. Before any of you suggest me the links for setting background image and this that, I have already tried and it's not working.
The whole story goes like: I have an activity with fragments which have their own backgrounds with some input fields. When focusing over input fields, keyboard appears and background image squeezes. For that I put an image on background of scrollview that fixed my issue of squeezing background but raised another concern that background Image should stay static while scrolling the parent scrollview.
The second solution any of you may suggest is setting background of my activity rather playing with scrollview. That's right, but for that I had to make a style element with background of theme which appears odd while transitioning different fragments plus it adds overhead when I have a lot of code and fragments to move forward and back.
That's the point where I am stuck. I have gone through links below, if you just need to know that I tried it or not.
link1
link2
link3
... and so on
below is the layout I am using for my fragments (it's all being done programmatically)
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:id="#+id/top_layout"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:orientation="horizontal" >
<ScrollView
android:id="#+id/scrollView1"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:fillViewport="true"
android:scrollbars="none" >
<FrameLayout
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content" >
<ImageView
android:id="#+id/backgroundView"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:contentDescription="#string/app_name"
android:scaleType="fitXY" />
<LinearLayout
android:id="#+id/parent_view"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="vertical" >
</LinearLayout>
</FrameLayout>
</ScrollView>
</LinearLayout>
So if you guys have any better solution keeping in mind the situation I have, will be warmly welcomed. Thank you

None of the above works for me with some reason but this things works.
getWindow().setBackgroundDrawableResource(R.mipmap.img_reg_bg);
put it in oncreate method hope it will help.

If I guess right you try to fix your hotfix to get it working propperly. If I'm right you sould go back to scratch and do it without your scrollview.
If you have a look at following Link:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/activity-element.html#wsoft
you'll see softkeyboard mode can be adjusted. "adjustPan" should solve your problem.
"adjustPan"
The activity's main window is not resized to make room for the soft keyboard. Rather, the contents of the window are automatically panned so that the current focus is never obscured by the keyboard and users can always see what they are typing. This is generally less desirable than resizing, because the user may need to close the soft keyboard to get at and interact with obscured parts of the window.

Add someimgage to your drawable folderes, like drawable-mdpi, drawable-hdpi.
In your LinearLayout "#+id/top_layout" add attribute:
android:background="#drawable/someimage"

How to use two activites in a single screen in android?

I want to display two different activities in a single screen how can i do that in android?Please if anybody has idea share it.And I don't wanna use fragments.
I want to display a screen which contains some fields and below(at the bottom of the screen) I want another screen with some buttons.
Is this possible in android?
If so, How can i do this ?

You can't have two activities in one screen. You can have only one. So, ultimate solution is Fragments.

An activity is not directly a visual component, so I'm thinking that what you're really asking is how to have a single activity display different views.
There's nothing that says you can't rerun setContentView() with a different layout/view ID. But there's another non-fragments way of doing what your probably want.
You can define more than one full-size (match_parent) view in a layout. What you want to do is set the visibility for one of them to "visible" with android:visibility="visible" and all the others to "gone" with android:visibility="gone".
Then when you want to switch the displayed view, you'll run setVisibility(View.GONE) on the outgoing view and setVisibility(View.VISIBLE) on the incoming. It's important to use GONE and not INVISIBLE or the layouts won't render correctly.
Sample layout file:
<FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
tools:context=".MainActivity" >
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent" >
<ImageView
android:id="#+id/img"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:visibility="visible" />
<SurfaceView
android:id="#+id/video"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:visibility="gone" />
<WebView
android:id="#+id/web"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:visibility="gone" />
</FrameLayout>
Sample Code to switch view:
video.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
img.setVisibility(View.GONE);
web.setVisibility(View.GONE);
That said, you probably want to learn how to use fragments since you can handle switching the view along with other state in a single unit of work (a transaction). But the above approach above does work for simple view changes.

How to divide Android game screen

I am working on a game application and in a horizontal orientation.
I use the left 1/3 of the screen for displaying scores and controls and the right 2/3 for displaying my game board.
My game works as is, but I currently use a single canvas to display everything. This makes my game logic more complicated because I must always add 1/3 of the screen width when displaying any graphics.
Seems like *I should be able to define 2 sections of the scree*n (left 1/3 and right 2/3), maybe using two canvases, such that each section provide me a unique coordinate system starting at 0,0. This would make my game coordinate math much easier.
Can I use multiple Canvases in one activity? Can I place them wherever I'd like?
Thanks

You can use fragments for dividing the screens.

Its better to use fragments or Fragment video tutorial, identify 3 fragments and in let in each fragment have a canvas

You can use weights in linear layout
which are used to divide the layout as desired ratio
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/layout/linear.html#Weight
Fragments
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Fragment.html
use fragments for second layout
example
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:orientation="horizontal"
android:weightSum="1" >
<LinearLayout
android:layout_width="0dp"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:layout_weight="0.33333"
android:background="#android:color/holo_blue_bright" >
</LinearLayout>
<LinearLayout
<--fragment here -->
android:layout_width="0dp"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:layout_weight="0.6666"
android:background="#android:color/holo_green_dark" >
</LinearLayout>
</LinearLayout>

fill_parent in LinearLayout isn't being honored

After much research on both SO and google, I haven't seen any one with exactly the same problem I am experiencing, so here it is:
I recently redid the entire UI on an android app. For the most part, I made only cosmetic changes to each of the screens. They appear in the UI editor of eclipse perfectly as expected. However, directly after doing this, two of the screens stopped being laid out correctly on both all tested devices and the emulator.
Now, the big problem one these two screens was that the root level LinearLayout didn't appear to be actually honoring the fill_parent for either layout_height or layout_width. it looks like it's being measured as if it were set to wrap_content instead. It only takes up about 70% of the screen - which is just enough to wrap the individual elements inside the root LinearLayout. I would post an image, but as a new user, I am not allowed to.
The layout isn't stretching to fill the screen. Here's the code for layout, except that there are a few more in the LinearLayouts containing a TextView and an EditText.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:background="#FF000000"
android:orientation="vertical" >
<TextView
style="#style/sans.white.16.bold"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:paddingTop="4dp"
android:text="#string/edit_account" />
<LinearLayout
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="horizontal" >
<com.teamunify.ondeck.widget.TUTextView
style="#style/sans.white.14"
android:layout_width="100dp"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="#string/first_name" />
<com.teamunify.ondeck.widget.TUEditText
android:id="#+id/acc_editor_first"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="40dp"
android:selectAllOnFocus="true"
android:singleLine="true" />
</LinearLayout>
I think the root LinearLayout should be filling both height and width. I've used this same layout many MANY times in our app without problems. (A quick count revealed that I used 76 LinearLayouts in our app, and all but two of them are working.)
At first, I suspected that perhaps our custom classes measure was wrecking things, so I changed the layout to use all plain EditTexts, but there was no change. I double checked the activity, but it isn't doing anything except to load this xml. So, in desperation, I redid the layout like so:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:background="#FF000000"
android:orientation="vertical" >
<TextView
style="#style/sans.white.16.bold"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:gravity="center|top"
android:paddingTop="4dp"
android:text="#string/edit_account" />
</LinearLayout>
After that, The words Edit Account appear with a black background mashed into the upper left corner. Clearly, the LinearLayout isn't filling the parent.
Long story short, I am asking how to fix this so that the LinearLayout fills the screen as expected.
I am at a complete loss as to why this is happening, and I am certainly hoping that someone on SO has an idea. This has got me pulling my hair out!

Try setting fixed width and height for the root layout.
Then only you will be able to debug who is driving length and width. It is very much possible that parent activity or background activity is setting dimensions. Once you identify the root cause you can go back to original settings.
As of now from your code snippet given here, nothing wrong here

If you use a custom activity as a container to other activities for some reason (In our case, we were recreating the look of our iOS app, and needed a custom menu to show up along the button side of the screen) the window manager seems to get a bit confused with what the actual height and width of the nested activities should be. A call to fillparent or matchparent ends up wrapping the content instead.
We ended up changing the behavior of several methods in our container activity class to make this work.