I'm updating an app to have a more material design look and feel. I have a refresh icon in my toolbar, and I'm wondering if this icon should change. Looking at google's new icons here https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/navigation/drawable-hdpi/ic_refresh_grey600_36dp.png , it looks like it has changed.
But on their downloads page it has a different icon https://developer.android.com/design/downloads/index.html. This is the one I have been using and it has two arrows. The new one just has one arrow.
Does anyone know if the one with one arrow is indeed the one google is switching to with material design?
you are downloading the wrong resources, you are still downloading the HOLO resources. You want the material resources found here
http://www.google.com/design/spec/resources/sticker-sheets-icons.html
I was wondering about the exact same thing some few days back. I couldn't find a definite answer anywhere, but from what I could gather, the one that is posted here, this is the latest one. If you see the latest Gmail android app, the refresh icon that comes up when you pull down, is the one with a single arrow. (and not 2 arrows)
Related
BottomBarNavigationBar template
BottomBarNavigationBar
Note : It should follow google material design guidelines also.
Removing Bottom Navigation Bar is not possible in non-rooted android device. But you can set buttons to just above the Bottom navigation Bar,it would work fine and look nice.
For changing text style you can go through this link. It would clear your doubt.
Changing the selected tab is definitely possible. For this go through this link
And finally I am sorry that I am giving just link here, as all the questions you asked are already available on SO.
So please, next time when you ask any question, then do a detail research about it then post that here.
All across the internet and several Stack Overflow pages, there are detailed instructions for the implementation of Floating Action Buttons, but nobody explains where I might be able to acquire the icon myself. Is everyone creating his own action buttons for his UI, or is there a downloadable library somewhere I have yet to discover?
Please link and explain!
Google doesn't provide any code for it, but it should be pretty basic to build yourself.
If you'd prefer to use a library for it, I use this one by shamanland: floating-action-button. You can change the color and icon displayed, and have it auto-hide when the user is scrolling.
There's another popular library by futuresimple here: android-floating-action-button. It includes support for sub-actions with text labels, and two button sizes, but won't give you auto-hiding on scrolling. I think I started with this one and switched to shamanland's, but I don't remember why.
I am creating Floating Action Button and shadow with .xml files as explained here and using icons from icons8.com, it has Android Lollipop specific icons.
well, I am working with an slide-menu library a couple of months ago (https://github.com/jfeinstein10/SlidingMenu), but I'm having trouble working with it since I'm using a Map fragment and I have this error: How to remove black cover on top of sliding menu?
I have worked with some workarounds about how to "solve" this issue, but anyways, in some phones doesn't look that fine. So I was wondering about changing slide-menu library, and then I saw 4sq and G+ changing theirs. About a month ago, for example, G+ used to look like this: How did Google manage to do this? Slide ActionBar in Android application
And 4sq like this: ActionBar and sliding out menu in android, but now they changed (to the same slide menu library I guess) and look like this:
You can see here that 4sq app changed the menu most likely because they suffered same issue with the map fragment.
As you can see, now slide menu goes OVER the view, and it has 3 horizontal tiny bars that hints the user to tap on it in order to discover a menu. Those bars shrink and expand when expanding/colapsing the menu.
I remember once I saw someone here in stackoverflow referencing this library, It's just I can't remember the name of the library neither the question I read it from.
This is the new DrawerLayout class in the support library. There's an entire page devoted to setting it up here.
To get more informations about practices, design or navigation, check this page.
I want to create a custom title bar, somewhat like this, in my Android app. Please pardon if my question seems idiotic, I'm a beginner. Can anyone tell me if it is a titlebar or an Action bar? Plus how can I give this Shaded Black color to my titlebar/action bar?
PS: I'm using GingerBread on my Android. My app will require minimum SDK version to be 4 but it targets Jelly bean too. In GingerBread, I can't make use of ActionBars. Please help me with the problem. It would be highly appreciated.
You will want to use the ActionBarSherlock library for this (which will allow you to use this all the way back to SDK version 4).
It is reasonably easy to style, and is for sure the right way to do this. Lots of examples for this, as it is a very popular library.
http://actionbarsherlock.com/
If you are wanting to target min API 4, then as you state you'll be unable to use the ActionBar.
So you could just create your bar as a LinearLayout or something with whatever buttons / icons you want on it and have it at the top of all of your Activities. If you have many of them it would probably be worth it to refactor the Bar (click handlers and such) handling into a subclass of Activity, and then extend that with all of your other activities.
The visual effect could be easily achived with a 9-patch png set as the background of a LinearLayout. Just make the gradient you want in photoshop/Gimp and drop it into draw9Patch to add the pixels on the edge that will allow it to stretch nicely to fit any screen.
Edit: using actionbar sherlock as others suggested is probably a better idea than doing it "manually" as I suggested.
Recently I became the proud owner of an Android 4.0 tablet and have been snooping around trying to create some apps. Now that I have the basics covered, I'm diving more into the "what's good/what's wrong" parts.
As far as I understand, the old "menu/settings"-button is deprecated (in the sense that you shouldn't use it anymore) and now the ActionBar is the way to go. Upon reading further, I came across this: http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/ActionBarCompat/index.html
It shows how to use the ActionBar on pre-API 11 systems. On the left you can see the typical menu where all options are shown a developer decided weren't important enough to be in the actual UI (the "wrong" way, but programmed using the newer ActionBar API). On the right, that same menu is now on the ActionBar.
My question is: Since it's been said such an "overflow"-menu is bad design on older mobile devices, is it also bad design when it's on the ActionBar as a button like shown on the right screenshot? Or is it only considered bad design because on a lot of devices it required you to press a physical off-screen button which makes it a non-issue when it's a virtual button on the ActionBar?
In short: Should I avoid it or not? Frankly, I like the idea of having a menu on the far right with all options that either don't fit or aren't important enough to be their own entity on the ActionBar.
Please also point out if any of the information I gathered and explained here is wrong.
The options menu hasn't been removed, it's just moved. It used to be hidden "behind" the Menu button on the device, but it's now moved to the ActionBar. Items on the menu either show as icons on the ActionBar, or on the overflow menu. You use exactly the same code to add items, whether to the old style menu, or the new style ActionBar.
A big part of the improvement that's been made is there is now a visible button on the top-right of the screen to open the "menu" (ActionBar overflow), which is right next to the other options. this is much better than before where the menu button had no visual connection to the app.
I suggest you look at ActionBarSherlock, http://www.actionbarsherlock.com, as it makes it pretty easy to add the full ActionBar to pre Android v3.0 devices.
http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/actionbar.html
Finally, I'd suggest that you follow the UI guidelines from Google. If they say the ActionBar is the right approach for navigation, then use it. It's best to use the provided UI patterns, and focus on the domain-specific stuff in your app.