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how to resize physical android screen from terminal/shell
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I'm thinking of purchasing an Android tablet for development. But I plan on developing both phone and tablet apps. I know that they technically both run they might just look different because of resolution differences.
My question is can I change the screen dimensions of a tablet to have the same screen size as a phone? Not really so much changing the resolution (so it would still take the whole screen), but more cutting of the edges so that the actual screen dimensions are that of a typical phone.
If you do not want to purchase a tablet, you can still test your applications using AVDs.
I haven't, however, ever heard of a way to change the screen dimensions of the tablet without actually slicing it through with a chainsaw :) If there are any ways I would be really interested in knowing!
play.google Here is an app by which you can change the density and other root properties of your phone. All the build properties can be edit by this if you have root permission of the device.
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The screens in my app needs to be displayed in the same way on both type of devices, phones and tablets. Currently my app works fine on phones, but they behave weird when run on tablets. The problem occurs with the positioning and size of components in the screen.I have 9 patch images generated for all the images being used but still for some components that I use absolute size/margin values such as 30dp,50dp etc do not seem to be good measures that work well on a tablet. Some of my thoughts/questions are:
PercentRelativeLayout - is it the best solution to overcome this
problem?
Is there a way that layouts can be defined so as to draw
differently on phones and tablets. Please note that that I do not
have any complex menus or behaviour that needs to work differently
on different devices, they are same.
Do I have to develop 2 different apps?
you have to make different layouts for both android phone and tablet.
Look at this link
Read more on the Android developer documentation after reading answers above. Found this resource to be more explicit for someone who is totally unaware of supporting multiple screens. http://www.survivingwithandroid.com/2012/07/how-to-support-multiple-screen-in.html
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Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
How to support different screen size in android
So im making an android app that i want to support both tablet and mobile phone screen sizes i tried using the supports-Screen method but when i type in support xlarge screens gives me an error.
Does anyone know how i could do this?
Thanks
You can check the src code for the last Google IO application, it support tablets and phone. And has several useful code snippets and design patterns.
IOsched
Hope this helps you :)
Supporting multiple screen sizes in Android can be tricky at first, but http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html will be your best friend.
As a beginner (I'm assuming you are a beginner) you must first create a default layout, then in Android you can begin adjusting your layout for tablets and such. A video that helped me immensely was this video from Google I/O last year. Deffinitely worth your time to watch the whole thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq05KqjXTvs&feature=player_embedded
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Is there a difference between developing for a smartphone vs for a tablet? i.e. iPhone vs iPad, Android vs Android Tablet. What are the main differences to take into account? I know its a broad question, but trying to wrap my head around the difference.
Edit:
If a company can develop for iPhone apps, does that mean that the company could easily develop for iPad as well? Do companies specialize in iOS smartphones and not iOS tablets?
The main difference is screen size. Sounds like an open door, but if you actually write apps targetted at both phones and tablets, the differences become very clear.
Take sending an email from your app. On iPhone you get a nice full-screen mailer. On iPad, full screen would be too much of it, so you need to embed it in a smaller overlay.
Take scanning a QR code. On iPhone your screen is just the right size for such a thing. An iPad is just a little too big.
Take having a "More..." menu. On iPhone, having 4 rows saying "About", "Settings", etc is a good design. Having the same 4 rows full screen on iPad looks really, really bad.
For iPhone/iPad in the examples above, you can read Android Phone vs Android Tablet of course.
On the low level OS side, there is no real difference. It's the same OS.
One of the best answers is from what you'll find on developer.android.com
Each screen size offers different possibilities and challenges for
user interaction, so in order to truly satisfy and impress your users,
your application must go beyond merely supporting multiple screens: it
must optimize the user experience for each screen configuration.
Usually the programming is the same the only change is layout and maybe a few extra buttons or less buttons.
UI design is the main difference. Tablets have more screen space. In most form/control-based apps (as opposed to games), this makes you redraw pretty much the whole app layout for tablets.
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Tablet or Phone - Android
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Closed 8 years ago.
Is there a method to identify if the device the app is running on is a phone or a tablet? We want to implement different behavior depending of the device type.
If you want the differnce because of screensize, you should find screensize, but this is not really easy, as there are tablets with small screens and phones with large screens. Still, it is ofcourse possible to get screen size.
You could try to do do something with GSM capabilities. But again, there are exceptions, like tablets that can call..
I would advise against making this differentiation, and define it on the basis that you need. Screensize, capabilities etc. You might get groups that consist of both "phones" and "tables", but you'll have a much better knowledge of what your group is like.
I'm still not sure how to define a "tablet" and everything you try needs that definition, but if you take a look at this link, you can see that it might be (did a quick read) that things that consider themselves tablets do not identify themselves in a user-agent string as a mobile device.
But:
you would need to get the useragent string for the devices' browser. Which would be illogical to use i guess
Useragent strings can be changed, like some people don't want mobile sites, so they change their agent string. That would influence your behaviour, which is weird.
In the end I think you need to define what a tablet is, and then check for that!
Is there a truefire way to make sure my app will display the same on my Motorola Droid 2 as it will on other Androids?
I use nothing more than basic Linear Layouts, Image Views, Buttons etc - is there a good checklist to go by before I even think about launching an app?
Clipping issues, What SDK I should launch my app in, etc...?
Make sure you are following the guidelines for supporting multiple screen sizes.
You can use the emulator to experiment with the different possible screen sizes and densities, as described in that document under how to test your app.
You can make emulator of different screen sizes to check your application.
One thing make sure you don't use "px"(pixels) anywhere in your application, use dp instead of px.