Is there any way, specifically in android studio, to see what one's custom dialog would look like without actually running the application? It seems that the Design view of layouts account only for entire-screen designs. It also seems that sometimes the way the "dialog" looks in the design view is wildly different than the way they look live.
I would share some of my code, I know you guys love that, but this isn't exactly a coding question, is it?
You can use third party tools and mirrors. I think the closest you can get is by checking this out.
This is hot swapping in general and you get interactive previews but like I said it is the closest you can get. I haven't worked thoroughly with it but I think this should be what you are looking for.
Related
I want to add a small type selector, which will give the user three options (good, so-so and bad).
Quickness and simplicity are the main goals.
Something like this would be great:
What type of widget should I use? (I'm using android studio)
I didn't downvote, but the reason might be that you are asking for a iOS-ish pattern, not really present in the android guidelines nor ever promoted by Google.
The common way of achieving what you want in a neat, but framework-accepted way, is using RadioButtons inside a horizontal RadioGroup. I believe there's no need to tell you how, as there are dozens of questions here and it is a pretty straightforward task.
If you really want to stick with that pattern, you could use some external library, like this.
I did search the internet to find an answer to my questions but there are no websites that did help me, so I hope someone can! Thank you in advance and have a nice day :-)
So these days I've been busy to get more into the Android Design guidelines and to learn more about it and how to implement it in my future applications. This is the main website I use to see what the guidelines are: http://developer.android.com/design/index.html. Great website but there are a few small things I just can't find in the dev guide or somewhere else. I just don't know how to implement some (simple) UI elements.
Can someone provide me code snippets of the following questions? (I want to know how to do it as simple as possible, how Google ment it!) It can help other (starting) developers too!
My main question is, are there special elements to achieve these things? As they are the key element in Android 4.0 it should have this things as some standard right?
1) Android 4.0 is using titles with dividers a lot in there new theme and it's looking great. But I can't find how to do implement this element simple like it should. What I want to know is how to make this blue title text with the grey looking divider underneath it look at this picture:
2) How to make section dividers in general? Like this image:
3) How to make a list with section dividers and give a list-item a 2-line explanation under it's name like this:
I did search the internet to find an answer to my questions but there are no websites that did help me, so I hope someone can! Thank you in advance and have a nice day :-)
In most cases how you are going to have to do it is create a custom layout. I tried recreating the look of the people application this way. for the most part the look you are going for is similar to the PreferenceActivityview. That gives you the look of the last image and probably how it was done in the People application with some extra programming. I just found it easier to create my own layout though instead of trying to mess around with that.
To my knowledge there is nothing in the api to create what you are looking to do easily and custom layout are going to be the way to go.
the custom dialog layout like you show in the beginning is very simple to do so if you dont know how to do manipulate layouts I would start there. look up the android color swatches to get the color of that blue
Edit
another thing you could do is look through the People source code and see how they did it but it will probably be more of a pain than what its worth when you can just do a layout
I see a lot of these apps like Pulse that have really nice UIs on the android: http://cdn3.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Pulse-android-625x515.jpg
I want to make a UI similar to this: http://wpuploads.appadvice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/3030-642x481.png where the text is editable/selectable/copyable. Basically an actual textfield, which I believe Android's canvas doesn't supply. How would I create UIs like this on Android. Android's normal xml layout in my opinion usually ends up making some pretty ugly stuff, and OpenGL might be a bit too high end for this kind of job. Any suggestions.
I tried looking around the forums and couldn't find anything really similar to this question? And I am not looking for a GUI builder, but more of something to actually develop the UI. Thanks!
As Mark says, they use normal XML layout. Personally, I've never looked at it, therefore I can't be sure, but I don't see anything "special" that couldn't be done with it either.
About the second app, I think it's even simpler than Pulse, probably. However, it's heavily customized (state drawables, probably), and you'd need StateListDrawable, a couple of 9patch graphics and the custom font you want to use.
If you're not familiar with customizing the appearance of controls, I suggest you start looking at those links above, and Google, of course.
One final note: designing a good UI is hard, let alone a custom UI where you start more or less from scratch, like those above. The Android UI provides a default look and feel that you can use... ICS being much better out of the box, but that's it (and at least it provides default tools to change that). If you can't do, or don't have the experience and/or skill, I suggest sticking to the defaults or outsourcing that job.
Good luck!
I tried looking around the forums and couldn't find anything really similar to this question?
That's because you already rejected the answer. Pulse is written using "Android's normal xml layout", as are most apps on Android outside of games.
I am not familiar with creating android apps by any means. However my company is looking to have an app build up. First they would like to have someone design a custom UI for it. However most apps I use at least all generally have the same core UI look/feel which is something we would like to avoid. I have seen apps though that don't even remotely look like the rest. So I am wondering if theres any place to find out what the basic canvas of an android app looks like . Is there any PSD's anywhere for this? Not one hundred percent sure what I am looking for other than concepts at the moment, but we want to know that our concepts are at the least plausible. So if anyone knows any good resources Id be interested to know.
Not PSDs, but you should take a look at the newly launched Android Design site, especially the Building Blocks section to understand what is available out of the box for you. Pretty much all of the controls you can style pretty extensively if you're willing to put the work into it, but have varying degrees of built-in configurable styling flexibility.
Note that while there's something to be said for ingenuity and being able to stand out from the crowd, there's also the flip side of comfort and usability for the user that comes with a familiar look and feel. If you're looking to come up with your own custom controls, etc. and you're not even familiar with creating Android apps, I hope your company is willing to budget a lot of time for the steep learning curve (the learning curve of Android is not so bad, but adding a lot of custom UI on top of that is not trivial for a first project).
I'm writing a new app for android and I would like to implement also a first launch tutorial. In particular, the tutorial has to be interactive. Basically, after a user registers to the service, a minimum settings will be required.
I'd like something like today we have into Google Apps, like Sheets, Docs and so far. The exception there is that those tutorials have the aim to explain how the app works. Here I want to have something where user can input some data.
I was looking at ShowcaseView but seems to be deprecated and old in style.
So here the question is: what is the best way to implement that? ViewPager?
I also had a look to this other question, but it did not help too much.
Any advice is really appreciated.
EDIT: I have found this other nice alternative. AppIntro It seems what I was looking for. :)
There are few I found by quick searching Github:
https://github.com/Seishin/showcaseview-android
https://github.com/worker8/TourGuide
https://github.com/amlcurran/ShowcaseView
I'm pretty sure you can find the right one for you ;)
You can do it in several ways that really depends on you and your app. Basically you can create a "Boarding" experience with ViewPager that will go thru the main screen of your app (with static images for example) where you explain the user what goes on in your app. The other way way is an interactive tutorial as the user already landed into your app - you can achieve this with something like Showcase (I'm pretty sure that there are libs on GitHub that are still maintained).
I would recommend Roman Nuriks Wizard Pager code on Github as a starting point. It's not so much a library as a sample code showing you how to do what you want.
The general approach is to use a ViewPager with some form of navigation buttons to move the user forwards and backwards through the pager Fragments.
https://github.com/romannurik/Android-WizardPager