It seems to difficult to creating UI for android application using XML layout (:at least for me).is there any plug-ins or any other method by which I can create UI for Android application ??
It is difficult at first but once you're used to it it is second nature. If you intend to take up Android development seriously, XML UIs is an essential skill and you should learn it well.
That said, the Eclipse setup for Android has a GUI layout maker as well, and there is DroidDraw as well.
You can also recreate about 95% of XML layouts using Java code if it suits you better.
Check out http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adt.html which has GUI design tools. It's pretty easy, you can just drag and drop the widgets you like.
Related
I wanted to create my own tool for android where i will change xml and that should reflect android ui side by side likewise what android studio and eclipse does.
Can someone tell me what android studio and eclipse uses to render ui from xml as shown in screenshot.
First off: it is not really clear what you want to achieve so I think I should ask some questions first.
- Do you want to create an add-on for an existing IDE?
- Do you want to create an Android Application?
- Do you want to create an IDE similar to Android Studio/ Eclipse?
Answer: If you want to create your own IDE then you need to implement the parsers and preview using 2D drawing. The tools AndroidStudio or Eclipse use to display the XML Views are part of the IDE. As far as I know there is no tool that will display your XML preview as they do. Follow the next instructions in order to implement that part.
But regardless of the answer to any of the questions above, here are some directions.
Since you need to know what kind of content you're using, you should start with an xml parser. How to do that can be found here.
Next step would be to actually draw the Views hierarchy somewhere. For that you need a basic 2D drawing knowledge, and you can start here
Access the resources for different platform and draw them to your window, using processed xml information and Android specific images. You can access the Android specific resources (images) for different platform, through the AOSP here
I hope i managed to point out some directions.
This is a complex thing to do:
One and only solution , Making the compiler for XML, If there are openSource XML parser for java Use them.
If there are not any I am afraid you have to make your own.
unity can do it for you its funny but you can do it with unity you can make android native views like button and ... in as objects in unity and load xml for adding views in right place,its so hard but possible and intresting
I am planning to develop an Android based mobile for my Human Computer Interaction based project. I am looking for a UI designing application for Android platform. Can it be achieved with Eclipse or is there a better way of developing UI for Android applications that could be used directly with coding ?
Thanks,
Manoj
You can directly code your UI too if you want to. It just takes long, and you open a window for errors.
Developing UI with eclipse using XML is great and easy, why don't you want to use it?
If by UI you mean "not-the-basic-UI", then it's possible too with eclipse - if you want a customized view then you code it, and if you want the normal UI views to look differently, theres a way to do that too (I'm pretty sure you can set your own pictures for button-state-pressed, button-state-selected and so on...)
You need to be more specific with what you want to do.
Use java EE eclipse with (Android Development Tools) plug-in. Upgrade the android SDK in eclipse.
Eclipse has an extension called ADT (Android Development Tools).
Hope you have installed it. Here is the link for installing Android in Eclipse.
Eclipse provides the help for design the UI for android. It is just drag and drop.
Hope this helps
Eclipse has a builtin GUI builder that is fairly good, there is also DroidDraw, which may be slightly easier to use. I would recommend using Eclipse's builder myself, both are somewhat limited without hand-coding XML really.
Quick side note: Be sure NOT to use AbsoluteLayout, as I have seen a few people starting out with Android programming fall into the pitfall of thinking it will make GUI design easier. Issues will arise very quickly.
Can anyone tell me how we can create or access GUI in Android NDK.Basically I want to reuse some existing UI components while in some places I need to create new ui components
Short of using Qt, which I find that option purely unacceptable at this time, you will probably need to design your own gui. I check in and see if the NDK community has grown for this, and the most recent thing I have found was Qt.
Google should give this section of android more love, before Ubuntu and others do.
You can write new UI components in Java as subclasses of View. In fact this is how most of the system widgets are written.
Barry
I am new to android.
As I know, an android app used xml to construct the gui.
Is there a tool to create the gui xml from a visual drag & drop editor?
Have a go with Google App Inventor.
App Inventor only output .apk file. Is there a way to output the XML layout?
DroidDraw you give some help. But not quite easy to use. It can only produce some basic structure.
Well, there's the gui builder in eclipse, which is useful in a few cases. Although, your better of just making the XML yourself, and doing the fine tweaking in the gui editor.
There is droid draw, but from my experience with relative layouts it fails to properly build the xml.
There is also app inventor, but I haven't tried it though so I don't know how well it works.
If your looking for something that is as nice as the iPhone's gui builder, from my experience anyway, your out of luck. Roll up your sleeves and start hacking out xml. (Or java code if you want to write 10x as much). Sorry to have to tell you that.
We are beginning to learn Android, converting our iPhone apps over.
There is a rudimentary editor for layouts in Eclipse, but it's not very good. Is there a visual designer that would be on par with the iPhone "Interface Builder" ?
AFAIK there is no such builder yet for Android,
Check out droiddraw and try to make the most out from Eclipse builder, those are the best and only interface builders. Anyway once you get in, you won't spend to much time creating lots of interfaces, as you will reuse them or the inbuilt components like preferencescreen.
When developing and thinking about layouts, think them as they were like HTML layouts.
App Inventor looks interesting, but it's still in beta and you need to request access:
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
It seems to have a nice interface for building Android UI's and actually generates other code such as networking and database code.