I have a sophisticated design for an Android app and designed using Photoshop.
The app has many drawings and curves which mean I can't use Android Studio to develop it there.
I know there are many ways to slice in Android, but I can't find the best way yet to finish the job quicker and with a higher quality.
The VERY BEST solution - use Zepline online service: https://zeplin.io/ .
It is, this service authomatically calculates all dimensions in 'dp' (you don't have to calculate everything manually)- just select widget and see margins, space between elements, etc. But, the MOST useful thing, is that it converts your pictures into .png files to drawables for ALL densities. It releive you from pain of scanling up and down all pictures.
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How is someone supposed to use the drawables located in ...\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platforms\android-22\data\res in Android Studio projects?
For example, if someone would like to change the Floating Action Button icon to a pencil icon, what is the standard practice?
Is there some kind of documentation available that demonstrates what each drawable XML file actually looks like when drawn? Or are you expected to copy and paste these into your project in order to see what they actually draw?
Surely there is some kind of gallery somewhere...
Unlike any other O.S, Android powers billion devices with different screen sizes, ranging from small phones to large TV sets. And it becomes a primary necessity to run apps with perfect User Experience on all sorts of devices! And for that purpose Android uses DIP or DP (Display Independent Pixels).
And coming to the solution to your question, consider reading from here
And, the general procedure is to generate images of different resolutions for different screen sizes, see this
Also, this video explains it simple!
And in order to generate multiple images with different resolutions for the respective screen sizes, I personally use a resizer tool. Final Android resizer, available here.
hope it helps!
Actually I need some suggestion like Designing screens for android mobile as well as tablet. As of now im creating two different folder for xml one is for mobile and another one is for tablet. Im placing images in 4 different images with 4 different resolution like (160 dpi, 240 dpi, etc). so am i going in right way or i need to change the way of designing. Thanks.
When designing for different devices it is important to test whether there is a necessity to create different layout files for the different devices. If you find that you do want that then there is plenty documentation online about it. Read these first:
Designing for different screen sizes
Guide lines
More android screen size documentation
Each of these links explain the new methodology of designing for multiple screen sizes.
A few tips on top of the already answered question that I gained by experience:
Use #dimen everywhere you have to specify a width/height but in general, avoid specifying them if you can. This way, you can override the dimension based on the available DPI and don't have to replicate your layouts.
Use LinearLayout wherever you can and use weights to determine how things should be drawn. Other layouts like relative layout are fine as long as they're used for positioning (isLeftOf for instance) as opposed to making a certain space available.
Use fragments wherever you can. It's much easier to work with self contained fragments. In general, avoid having any UI logic in your activities and let the fragments handle them.
Use the Android Asset Studio (http://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/icons-actionbar.html#source.space.trim=1&source.space.pad=0&name=ic_action_example&theme=light&color=33b5e5%2C60) which will take care of resizing your images for you. It's been very valuable to me. Have a look at these other projects too. They can help you in many aspects when designing your UI: http://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/
Even when you do all this, you may come across a scenario where you really do need to write a different layout for tablet and phone. If this is the case, as long as you've created everything in self contained fragments, it's much easier to switch fragments or even use the same fragment code with different layouts (as long as they contain the same UI elements) depending on the dimension. It would also be advisable to use the trick here (Determine if the device is a smartphone or tablet?) to determine if you're running on a large/small tablet or a large/small phone.
All in all, it's a little bit painful developing and testing your app on all the available device sizes but as long as you follow the above points, you'll have an easier time.
I have been learning android development and I am still new to this.
I have already designed many apps for iOS.
Is there a better way to have my layouts as easy as iOS?
because in iOS I only have to drag and move it wherever I want . Where in android I have to insert tables and edit XMLs, which I find very confusing and not flexible to deal with.
I have read and watched many tutorial and still find it a bit difficult to deal with
Thanks
There is a layout editor for Android that you can use in Eclipse. Is that what you're looking for?
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adt.html#graphical-editor
The short answer is NO. The long answer is that this is how it's done on Android, and it's much more flexible than the iOS method. Just imagine making Android app the iOS way and support screen sizes such as 240x320, 320x480, 480x800, 480x854, 540x960, 600x1024, 720x1280...and so on, and it's easy to realize that it would be an impossible task. This is almost certainly why Apple went with "Retina Display" with exactly 2x the pixel density and exact same screen dimension (3.5") - because doing anything else would mean that all the apps would need to be designed specifically for the new screen instead of just providing images with a #2x postfix.
So, instead of absolute positioning and sizing like the iOS, XML is used in Android where designers are tasked to come up with one or more layouts that can support this diverse range of screen sizes.
You can use Eclipse Layout Editor for Drag and Drop with absolute layout. But using absolute layout is not a good practice because in iOS screen size is fixed for all device but in android there are different screen size device are available and if you design a layout considering a single screen size it will be messed on another screen size device. You must follow the norms to create a layout go through this link for more detail.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/layout-objects.html
I am saving 4 copies of every image in my game, each with a different density. They are saved in the relevant res/drawable-* folder, and it seems to be working great on various devices.
So, currently, I open up photoshop, and have one psd for each image. I edit the vector's appropriately, change the density, and save the image in the appropriate folder. I have to do this 4 times, for every image. It takes forever, and I am trying to avoid getting sloppy and messing up one density of one image and not noticing it.
Is there a better way to this? When you have to create and edit your drawables over the course of development, how do you do this?
Check out batch processing in Photoshop. It will be the same thing you do, only automated
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Batch_Process_Images_in_Photoshop
I have a client that gave me a .psd file that contains the entire screen of an Activity with all the graphics. The resolution is 480x800. The client wants the application to look identical to the one in the .psd file. The problem is that different devices have different resolutions and sizes. I know that the density is what really matters but how can I scale the graphics to look the same on all the devices? For example, I exported all the layers and recreated the screen in Android but, for some reason, the screen looks more crowded on a Nexus One (480x800).
One idea would be to create 9 patch images from the graphics and use for ImageViews android:background instead of android:src right?
Isn't it better to have a 320x480 resolution for the graphics? Or do I need for both resolutions? Also, I have to consider the height of the status bar which I understood it is 25dip but I am not certain about this.
So, to summarize, I am interested to find out what is the best way for a client to give you the mockups and graphics so that it is easy for the developer to implement according to the specifications.
That's something that's not easy to solve. Think of a webdesigner, one can't know all the possible resolutions and settings of every browser so he has to scale things accordingly.
In my opinion there are only three approaches here.
First: Let him state what devices he wants to support and only support those devices. Extract the layers with the size of the device with the highest resolution and scale them down on other devices.
E.g. If you have to support two devices with 480x800(2) and 240x300(1), export all images to be 480x800 and scale them down accordingly. Don't write a single application for every device.
Second: Export the graphics with the highest resolution possible and scale them down on all devices relative to the device being used. Imagine, again, a webdesigner. All he does is define margins, paddings, etc. and it will look nice in almost any browser. You should do the same and resize your elements on demand.
Third: Make the application fixed, e.g. define a size of 200x200 for your whole application and just fill everything larger than the screen with a certain color, e.g. black. This happens a lot with java ME applications, they look great on the hardware they were made for and are still playable on hardware that is beyond their time though they look pretty ugly.
Hope this helps,
Robin.