Develop Reference

How can i create a pulse-like settings view? See photo

As topic. Does any one know how to create that snap-settings-view the pulse app uses to its left?
I.e. When you swipe your finger from the left edge, the settings start to show from behind. See the left part of the image below. After a certain amount of movement, the settings menu snaps almost all the way to the right, but still shows the underlying view.
Any help is much appreciated
Regards

You have two options:
you can either do yourself with two fragments (one in front and one behind) and some touch even listener translating the drawer to open and close.
or use a library that is probably doing the same thing I've described. Something like this one: http://www.androidviews.net/2012/11/sliding-menu/

Sliding drawer looks like semi circle

Android provides the SlidingDrawer by default looks like below image -
Image http://www.gru.at/android/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/s_open.png
Can we customize this SlidingDrawer looks like semi-circle type with buttons included. For, example take a look at below image -
Anyone done the SlidingDrawer like above one. I've googled it. Didn't get any nice solution for this. Anyone has idea/example blog for this?

So make sure you have Gimp and 9-Patch at the ready for a lot of trial and error...
Then what you wanna do is...
Add suitable layout to hold buttons where the current ImageView Handle is, like Horizontal LinearLayout or RelativeLayout
Cut the id of the current ImageView Handle and add it to this new Layout you just added
add your buttons to the LinearLayout/RelativeLayout (you can test it now, the buttons and the handle should all slide open at the same time)
Now add Button listeners for each of the buttons
Set the SlidingDrawer to android:allowSingleTap = "false" (tit for tat, you cant have the single tap option anymore, just the slide)
Use a ButtonSelector.xml to have different layouts for buttons be pressed or not pressed.
This is the hard part. Edit the drawables for the buttons, and handle so that they will fit together nicely if the screen is huge, small, landscape, portrait. I recommend using 9-Patch in conjunction with Gimp.
Pat yourself on the back because you now have a totally sweet custom sliding drawer.
Make sure you post pictures and state any problems or issues you ran into as I have never fully implemented this, but I did get to step 6 to make sure it was possible.
Last but not least, Good Luck...

Thanks for RelativeLayout and FrameLayout These layouts makes my requirement comportable with what i need. I've done like below steps -
First, i've splitted the full image into three pieces. And, merge these images with FrameLayout And, gave onclickListner to my center of image(Because, it was contain that arrow marks up/down)
And, i've used the Animation for just to open that View as SlidingDrawer
These steps helps me lot.

Android horizontal scroll programmatically

In Android, I want to create a particular control which may require to set the location of a component by fixed coordinates.
This is what I want to do. These screenshot are taken from a swing application of mine. I want to clone the buttons on top and their behaviour, into an android application. Basically if there are too many buttons in the menubar, left and/or right arrows appear, and clicking on them will scroll horizontally to access the hidden buttons.
I need to be able to set the coordinates of an horizontal linear layout inside another one, and even to set negative coordinates in order to scroll on the right.
I'm doing this using a null layout in swing. Can I achieve this with Android ?
I'm not sure if an HorizontalScrollView can do this. Could someone point out a good tutorial or something related to what I'd like to do.

I think a HorizontalScrollView can achieve what you intend to do with your Menu Bar. You don't need these "scroll" Buttons, because a user can swipe the menu.
You can nest LinearLayouts together, however you want. if you want to control their flow try to apply margins to them. You can set fixed Coordinates in an AbsoluteLayout, too.

Consider using a gallery? If not gallery, then a child or cousin of it. As far as I know, there is no ViewParent that will allow what your are shooting for.
Hope that helped ~Aedon

Android UI question. Implementation guidance

I'm working on implementing a UI for an Android application, and I wanted to ask if there is already something in the native widgets to accomplish most of what I'm trying to do.
The application that I'm working on performs 15 different tasks that can be divided into 3 different groups. (5 tasks per group) I have 18 icon images (3 for the groups and 15 for the individual tasks) and I want to be able to panel these icons (starting with the groups) like this:
I want the next icon visible below and above (if further down than the first icon) and swipe to go to the next icon
Once an icon is clicked, the panels slide to the side, exposing the next layer (the specific 5 tasks for the selected group) with the selected group still visible on the side:
From there, the user can tell at a glance what group they are in, what the current, next and previous selectable tasks are, and that by swiping right, they can get back to the group selection.
What types of widgets would I need to look into in order to accomplish something like this? Are there already pre-built lists to do these activities?
Thanks for any guidance!

You can get close with a LinearLayout of ImageView widgets and a ScrollView (vertical) or HorizontalScrollView. However, it will not give you the desired "centered image with bits of the previous/next images" effect -- it will be wherever the user positions it.
You can get close with a Gallery. However, it will not give you the vertical orientation, and it will always give you a fixed set of full options to the sides, not the partial images that you seek.
If it's gotta be the way you describe it, you'll have to roll it yourself. Gestures and animations should give you the desired effect.

Have you taken a look at ViewFlipper? http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ViewFlipper.html This will give the side by side effect but you will have to make custom views for each group to populate it with the proper icons.

I'd use a ListActivity for the first 3 top level items. This won't give you the auto centering effect that you'll probably want, but you should be able to look at the Gallery source code, which can be found here, and make some modifications to the ListActivity so that it autocenters.
For the next items, I'd add an onClick and a GestureListener so you can navigate to another activity with another list view. Since you know where you came from (add some data to your Intent) you can set the color rectangle on the left so that it appears that you have just swiped the whole view left.
If you need to customize the animation, you can call this:
overridePendingTransition(R.anim.slide_left_entry, R.anim.slide_left_exit);
To make the yellow icon look good as it animates to the left, I'd change the list bounds (on the first activity) to have no margins, and change the yellow icon to have square right edges - This will make the small yellow rectangle on the next activity appear to be part of the first activity.
It should be relatively easy to mock this up to see if it's going to work properly for you.
Good luck!
EDIT: Ok, so I've made a basic project that does most of what you want.
here is the link to the eclipse project file. I was going to put the source up here, but there's a bit much to display.
What you still have to do:
Tweak animation
Configure the layer lists to display the correct colors
Add information to the top level intent for the sub-activity to be able to configure itself.
Quite a few other small things.
I think I've got the main stuff done. I've also added the gesture listener I talked about, although re-reading your question, you actually didn't ask for that. Since it's cool, I left it in.
Good Luck once again!!

Have you thought of launching Activities with different view configurations? You can switch from one activity to another with a gesture and you can Animate the views. What your UI looks like to me is a bunch of screens with affordances that show the other screens. So one Activity per screen maybe the same in different configurations or something like that.

Positioning elements outside an Activity on Android

Is there a way to absolutely position an UI element on Android so that it is located outside an Activity? For example: can you create a fullscreen ImageView simply by moving/resizing an ImageView inside an existing regular Activity instead of creating a new fullscreen activity?
EDIT: Re-reading my question I see I wasn't very clear about what I'm trying to accomplish. I'd like to temporarily extend an element to cover the notification bar at the top of the screen. I need to create a semitranslucent fullscreen overlay but since translucent activities cannot cover the notification bar I'm trying to find out if it's possible for an element to break out of activity's bounds and resize itself to fill the whole screen, top to bottom.

That depends on what specifically you're trying to do. You can easily draw graphics offscreen and then animate their movement into the screen using a Canvas, but this is more for graphics than for user-interface elements. For moving buttons or such, you can have a look at another question here "How to position View off-screen". I gave a brief intro on how to use canvases, but the questioner found another way to do it using a customised linear layout and view animations.
Lastly, if you're trying to zoom and scroll an image around that's larger than the ImageView, there are some sources you can look at for inspiration. I realies this isn't strictly your question, but I'm including it since it might be linked to what you're thinking about. You can find a tutorial on Anddev.org and an open source app on Google Code.