Develop Reference

Ignore windowSoftInputMode for certain elements eg. Background Image

My question is, is there a way to get a certain view element to ignore the windowSoftInput setting, or to set a specific setting for one view element? (Any other solutions to my problem are also welcome)
Below are more details about my problem.
I have an Android activity with a background image set to the main FrameLayout. This layout contains a few other layouts, among others a brand logo on one side, and a scrollview with edittext boxes on the other side.
Using the windowSoftInput="adjustResize" works pretty well, but it distorts the background image. Using windowSoftInput="adjustPan" however pans the brand logo out of the screen and messes with the scrollview, and the keyboard blocks the edittext boxes.
So far, looking around the web and the docs I can't find a solution, or if this is even possible. Android layouts always seem to confuse me though..

Children of FrameLayout not clickable on some devices

I have designed a menu that consists of a few buttons in several different LinearLayouts all placed over an animated GLSurfaceView within a FrameLayout. When the user clicks a button in the interface, I set the current layout's visibility to GONE before making the next layout VISIBLE When the user selects a level, then game play starts and all layouts are GONE (apart from a control bar on the right of the screen, but that is not contained inside the FrameLayout)
On most phones the menu works like a charm, but I did a quick test on an Xperia Ray only to find that I couldn't go anywhere because the buttons wouldn't click. I have Log.d tags set up in most of my onClick Listeners, and in this case they aren't showing in the Logcat so it doesn't seem like the Listeners are firing at all. I also noticed that the GLSurfaceView wasn't returning anything from it's own TouchEventListener. Even though the functions triggered by tapping the GLSurfaceView are disabled while on the top menu, I normally still get a message in the Logcat.
I thought it could be something to do with the way I have used the FrameLayout. The documentation says it should only have one child, but another article I read on android developers demonstrated captioning images by displaying text over ImageViews inside a FrameLayout.
On a final note, I'll also say that I've tested in the emulators and I found that both android v2.3 and android v4 display the same behaviour as the ray. Currently those are the only ones I am sure of, aside from android v2.2 which runs my app perfectly. I am hesitant to trust the results of testing on the emulators.
I am personally stumped seeing as there is no error message to go on, but can anybody suggest a solution?

I found the solution.
Turns out that I had a stray ScrollView hanging around in my layout that was both above my root layout in z-order and visible by default. Instead of toggling the visibility of this view, I was doing so for it's child layout. Oops.
On most devices I have tested on, the stray ScrollView has not effected the functionality of my app, probably because the empty layout was allowing buttons behind it to be clicked. However it turns out that some devices, such as the Xperia Ray, are a little more strict on whether clicks can be passed down through layouts (possibly a performance decision).
The ScrollView was a required part of the layout so I couldn't just remove it. Instead I gave the the android:visibilty attribute to the ScrollView so that it would be GONE until it is needed by the interface and it won't block the user from clicking buttons.

Android - Animation movement of container does not correctly update contained buttons hitboxes

So I have an application running on Android 2.2 (on a HTC desire). When the user presses the menu key, my menus silkily slide in from top and bottom. This works just great. Or so I thought. It turns out that even when the ImageButtons are off screen and invisible, the hitboxes of the places where they were before I moved them out of sight activate the buttons.
I have tried:
_top_slide_out_menu.forceLayout();
_top_slide_out_menu.recomputeViewAttributes(_measure);
_top_slide_out_menu.computeScroll();
No difference. At a guess it may be because I am moving the parent container object using the animation rather than the buttons themselves. I can only hypothesise that there is a bug that does not update the child hitboxes.
This bug seems to also affect subsequent animations I apply to the button. I have a animation I run on a button that I have previously moved using a different animation. This second animation shrinks then grows the button to give the impression of a click. Only half of the button is redrawn, as that is the half contained within the area of the origional button location.
So the question is, has anyone run into this? Is there anything to try other than moving all the buttons individually (which would get rather tiresome)?
I'd appreciate any ideas at this point!
Thanks

Android animations only shifts the pixels of the UI controls when you add animations to them. To actually update the layout after the animation, you should implement an animation listener and manually update the layout other wise the old layout will still remain with the only the pixels shifted.

Placing a background picture and then having invisible touch (Android)

I am trying to make an application for android that is based on IPAD app. I want to keep the same look to the app, but I am not a very good designer. So I was wondering if it was possible to for me to crop say the entire header and then have an invisible button or something on top of portions of it. so the design would become a little bit easier. Also if that is possible how would I get the what ever the event item is going to be to overlap with a portion of the image if it has stranger orientation. (I think I could fake this by just moving it closest orientation and extending the size untill it fits, but it would be nice to find a better way.)
How would I go about that?
I tried making the button invisible, but that did not seem to work.
Thanks in advance

I got lost on your description. But if you want to make a button invisible, calling setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE); will not work, because it will not receive click events. You may want to set its color to transparent instead. try using:
button.setBackgroundColor(Color.TRANSPARENT);

Fragment animation question

In the Honeycomb sample gallery app, there's a layout that uses a two-fragment setup: one on the left of the screen showing titles, and one on the right showing the selected content. The titles fragment can be hidden with an animation.
During the hiding animation, the app asks the framework to recalculate the layout on every single frame. This way the content-fragment can take up the empty space that the titles-fragment leaves behind while it moves off-screen. This produces a great, dynamic effect, but is terribly inefficient I think.
I have fairly complex layouts, and I'd rather not ask the system to re-layout on every single frame. But I'd like a smooth transition animation like in the sample. Are there any alternative solutions to this problem?
P.s.: Just to be clear, I'm not asking how to do basic fragment-transaction animations. I know those, and AFAIK, those animations can't produce the behaviour found in that sample gallery app (another example would be the Honeycomb Gmail app, it has similar transitions that I'd like to achieve).

You can provide custom animations to the fragment system that do whatever you want. You can move the fragments around, fade them, etc. If these animations do not explicitly or implicitly cause layout (by changing properties that trigger a layout), then you should not get a layout on each animation frame. There maybe still be a layout call at the beginning/end as the fragments are added/removed, but the layout/invalidation process during the animation is up to your animations and what they do.