I am new to Android development and i am wondering about one thing. I want to create a simple list like descriped here: https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/lists.html#lists-specs
I cannot believe, that i have to implement it all by myself. Every ImageView, TextView with all their paddings and textsizes and so on. Is there something i overlooked? Is there a simple way like ready-to-use layouts?
If i want to use Material Design in a Web project, i could go to https://material.angularjs.org/latest/demo/list and create a list by just copy and paste the sourcecode. Does something like that exist for Android too?
No, you have to implement the view for a single item and android uses it as template. You can use a build-in list item only if you are showing String values.
Android developers sometimes also have to be UI developers.
You can check this tutorial: http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidListView/article.html
Have in mind that Material design in Android is slightly different than Material design for Web.
Related
Autocomplete in android makes easier to pick an item from the search text, i used listview for my previous project and it did quiet simple, in my new project i want to make something different view for autocomplete result, i did a Google for a some functionality but no luck.
I got a screenshot of a popular application, they have used different style,
like this,
how to achieve this? is there any library available? Helps appreciated!.
Yes, there are many available. I would recommend android-chips . There is a working example of this under samples folder.
I'm an amateur android programmer and I really like to code. My main difficulty is to make apps nice.
I came across a simple app, but at the same time, nice: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linksaude.bulas
I would like to know if this app has been designed with some specific plugin/add-on for Eclipse or whatever. It seems to be so consistent and beautifully designed that there must be an answer to simplify the building process of such apps.
Thanks!
I think what you're impressed with is the consistent color theme of the application. It looks like its designers carefully overrode the default design of Android widgets with their own custom scheme.
There is NOT any plugin for development tools that will help you achieve this; however, there are many external tools.
Here is a tool to generate styles for the action bar (the navigation bar at the top):
http://jgilfelt.github.io/android-actionbarstylegenerator
A tool to generate custom colored Holo widgets: (Holo is the theme in modern Android platforms):
http://android-holo-colors.com/
And my #1 favorite resource for this type of customization, this website:
http://www.stylingandroid.com/
These three are more than sufficient to customize an interface like the one you linked to above. Good luck!
Though beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this will do the job.
http://developer.android.com/design/index.html
Welcome to Android Design, your place for learning how to design
exceptional Android apps.
There are some DevBytes videos on YouTube of how you make your app beautiful.
The result is an application which looks very modern and beautiful, you should have a look at those videos
What are the possibilities to develop android apps with custom styled widgets (by widgets I mean gui elements like buttons, boxes, menus). I want to develop android apps which don't use the standard look and feel of android. What are the widget libraries available? Are there any other ways to achieve this?
One of the possibilities would be to use html and phonegap and style the app with css. But I'm looking for a non-html and phonegapesque way to achieve this.
Look for example at the apps mentioned on the following page:
http://androidquark.com/top-6-best-alternative-photography-apps-instagram/
did they draw their widgets themselves? Or can such effect be achieved using the themeing mentioned in one of the answers?
You can customize your widgets just about any way you wish. For example, buttons are easy to customize by using ImageButton, and assigning it to any graphic you wish. Here's an example of custom "buttons" in a palette in a soon to be released update to an app of mine...even the crayons are buttons.
You can find a collection of them here:
https://github.com/mingyuan-xia/DevAndroidQuickly
I have an iphone application that uses a UITableView. This table view uses the "Grouped" style and it looks quite good. Now i'm porting this application to android. Is there any Library/Example on how to make android's ListView look like iPhone's grouped UITableView (rounded corners etc) ?
Though, Personally, I wont recommend views with both platforms with their own sdk style, but if you still want to implement such a component. There is a Project hosted on GitHub, download the same and try with this.:
https://github.com/thiagolocatelli/android-uitableview
I came across this app and I wonder how was it developed on android (Cause it looks so much like an iphone app), see this screenshot.
Anyone have any idea how to accomplish that type of look on Android?
That's just a matter of styling after all. In general, I would consider it to be discouraged to make your Android app look like an iPhone app. Every platform has its own UX standards, and Android's standards are different from iPhone's. That quite obviously also reflects in the user interface.
Anyhow, you may want to read this article about Android themes and styles. It should get you going with defining own widget styles and stateful drawables to implement custom buttons.
This app obviously uses customized ListViews, ButtonView on the bottom of the screen.
Theses are pretty much standard and common in android apps.
Here is how to create custom components:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/custom-components.html