I am designing several screens (activities) for an app - each of which have a some non-common units (like picture, textbox, etc) and repeating units of a common layout X (X consists of a textbox, icons for favourite and comment number, with number of comments, a picture of the contributor).
In HTML/CSS there is an easy way to do this modular design by having a div tag for the unit X. How do you do such an aggregation of different units in android so that I can change the style at one single place. As of now, I am laying out each screen, and the sub-units of each unit in those screens separately
Thanks much
Related
I know this question has been discussed a bunch, but I am curious about how to be extremely precise with app design so it looks the same on all screen sizes.
So, for example, right now I have a counter on my home screen that has text under each number saying the unit of the number. The TextViews are placed super precisely in the design layout in Android Studio, but of course with a new screen size the TextViews will shift according to the screen.
So in my design view, this is what the counter looks like.
But in my emulator, which just barely has different screen dimensions, the TextViews shift and it looks like this.
Even with the slight change in screen dimensions, the view is already being altered and does not look right.
I know that I can and design the screens individually for small screens, medium sized screens, large screens, and tablets, but I am wondering how I can precisely design things like this for all screen sizes so I do not have to make a separate design for every single screen size out there.
Like I said, I know this topic is discussed a lot, but I am just curious as to how precision can be accounted for, or if there is a better way for me to be positioning things inside my .xml files
I need expertise advice/approach for starting screen development in android.
I got a couple of screens from my customer and i need to develop them.
I went through lot of tutorials and understood about supporting multiple resolutions and sizes all that is fine, but i want to understand basic things like how to properly place the UI elements. Should we need to use any tools like photoshop for measuring units like top bottom right left etc and place the UI element in xml or just by approxiamtion we will place the UI element.
For example consider this screen https://d13yacurqjgara.cloudfront.net/users/137442/screenshots/1234960/attachments/166804/Login-screen.png.
for ex How you will place the user name and password edit texts. I mean how much of top left bottom margins will be used. is that just approximation or need to be measured using tools like photoshop.
Say i used photoshop and got the values in pixes if i convert them to dp and use those values in layout will they support for other screen sizes??
are there any tools which can take the screen iamge which i posted above as an input and generate the android layout from it.
You don't need Photoshop to measure the units. The Android SDK has several layouts with their accompanying properties and options that will allow you to pretty much achieve any UI implementation. imho there are not tools that will 'take a screen image and generate the android layout from it'.
I read something about supporting multiple screen sizes in Android.
For that most of the answers recommended to create different layouts
(layout-normal, layout-small, and so on). But that would mean that
I have to define all my layouts multiple times. I don't think that
this is a smart solution.
Is there no way to create just one layout and to automatically scale
it for any display size?
There are several parameters in layouts in android that adapt themselves to the size of the screen (fill_parent, center...), however I have not seen in android's layout parameters for everything... for example 1/3 of width.
Finally what I am doing is the following:
One layout per architecture of the interface. For example, in tablets I change the architecture, integrating sometimes 2 layouts in one.
Include, programmatically, changes of sizes. For example, an button I want to be 1/3 of the screen I need to programmatically obtain the width of the screen and change the button size.
Always include several sizes of icons that android automatically selects depending on resolution.
But there is a significant part of the job that needs to be done "by hand".
I have a client who wants me to build an Android version for their existing iPhone app. The design of the iPhone doesn't use any native iPhone elements. It's basically some sort of grid with containing images, buttons, text, etc. Of course it was easy to make the iPhone app because of the fixed pixels widths/heights. The basic grid that defines a screen is loaded via a XIB file, and I load the custom buttons in the right containers in the grid by specifying the exact coordinates.
Then comes Android...
Our client wants to target 3 specific tablets (1024x600). They have given us designs for a ~600x980 portrait version of the app. It is not recommended to use AbsoluteLayout in Android. What is the easiest way to make sure that I can scale it on different devices but that it will look like the given design on the 3 target tablets.
One idea I had (which I'm not sure about whether I can implement it) was:
Get screen width in pixels and height
Based on width/height ratio of the design, pad with bars on top/bottom or left/right
Still do an AbsoluteLayout based on this information
I'd rather not do it this way because it sounds involved and counter to the Android way of doing things. Another issue that is created by scaling is the following. There is a bar of buttons that have a lines separating them. These lines are 4 pixels wide. Obviously, when you start scaling, this is going to mess this up completely. I can't seem to find much information about this s
You probably want to start here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
But quick points are probably
Do not use an absolute layout. Your life will become terrible
Handle sizes in density independent pixels so they will scale properly on different devices
Use ninepatch images so that when images stretch they will stretch in the proper regions maintaining your 2px borders ect.
Take advantage of the different resource folders for images at different densities (drawable-mdpi vs drawable-hdpi) and layouts at different sizes (layout-small vs layout-large). The latter will allow you to have separate layouts for your tablet devices.
Best of luck :-)
I am creating a simple game in android so I can create something and learn how to program in Android (I'm a noob).
Right now in my layout editor (i think thats what its called, basically the place where you can create your layout xml files) there are many sizes on the top left... which one should i target? do i need to make a separate layout for each one of them?
Thanks!
R
The screen size selection is only intended to give you an impression of what the layout looks like on various screen sizes and densities. A good place to get started is Common Layout Objects and Supporting Multiple Screens.
When developing for Android, you should not target a specific screen size, but instead make layout elements fit proportionally. An exception may be x-large displays such as tablets, for which a great read is Distributing to Specific Screens. An example of getting elements to position nicely is this question.