I was really confused about this topic, so I had to ask. Being new on Android, I was thinking of creating an introductory sort of tutorial like page for the app I am working on, like the one's you see on various apps that is used for the first time in which they point out various features of the app, what functionality does this button perform when pressed, what does the menu item do, in a sort of a dynamic way.
What are these actually ?? Are they splash screens? Or are they something really different?
I just made a tutorial screen for my app. What I did in my case was to :
1) Create snapshots of all the activities and their functions.
2) Then I used photoshop to put different markers defining the different areas in the snapshot and what they do. (which look similar to the link posted in the above comments)
3) Then I used an Imageswitcher with a next button at its bottom. At the start of the app if the user wants to view the tutorial I just start an activity with the Imageswitcher.
4) I then cycle through all the snapshots with the help of the next button below the ImageSwitcher.
5) On the last image of the ImageSwitcher I just launch an Intent to open the main screen of the actual app.
Hope this helps!!!
Related
I'm planning to implement tutorial screen for Android app.
My plan is that tutorial screen looks like:
There are several screens and you can swipe between than. Every view has custom design. There are dots which represents every screen, and show what page are you watching now. I need good-looking transition with adequate animations.
This screen will be full screen activity.
I have found several Image Galery, but I don't want to slide between images, I need to slide between views.
I do not need exactly code for this. I need instruction in which way this can be done, and what elements I need to use in order to achieve targeted design.
Thanks in advance.
You'll want to use ViewPager in conjunction with Fragments, the instructions are on Android developer's website.
I'm begining to learn android development, and I'm trying to make an app just to learn the language and philosophy.
This app, has to show an image in the middle of the screen, a button below, and a chronometer in the right side. When the app starts, the chronometer has to begin a countdown. When the user press the button, a blur effect has to be applied to the image, and the seconds left to finish the countdown increase by 10.
I almost know how to program the blur efect to the image, the button press, and the countdown and increase by 10 whenever the button is pressed. But I'm not sure about putting all together.
As far as I know, it should be done by designing an activity, and putting inside the activity the image, the button, and another image or a set of changing images or text for the countdown clock. But as I advance in my studied, today I have read that in order to manage different actions in an activity it is neccesary to do it by using fragments. And I have found much complex programming fragments than activities.
So the question is: can I make what I'm trying to do by a simple activity and defining classes and methods for the image effect and the countdown clock or have I to make it with fragments?
Thank you very much.
today I have read that in order to manage different actions in an activity it is neccesary to do it by using fragments
To be blunt, either you either misunderstood what you read, or you are reading the wrong material.
can I make what I'm trying to do by a simple activity and defining classes and methods for the image effect and the countdown clock
Yes.
have I to make it with fragments?
No. It is possible that the whole UI might be a fragment, particularly if it might be shown alongside something else in some cases (e.g., a tablet) and not in others (e.g., a phone). And there is nothing stopping you from making that UI using several fragments, though that would be rather unusual.
As others have already conveyed, no need to go with fragments.. Activity wud suffice.. As far as putting it together is considered, I guess you need to learn more about layouts.. Layouts are the files which basically help you put things on UI as you want it to look like.. There are plenty of material available online for understanding layouts.. Happy learning.. :)
I was recently using the app Secret and was observing the amazing user-interface that it has. If you are opening Secret's webpage, please scroll down a little to see the UI.
Being someone who is still a novice in Android and wants to learn, I would like to ask how that UI has been designed. I could ask a lot many questions in this one post but I will limit myself to just one for now.
Whenever you click on one of those tiles, it opens up and shows the comments for that particular tile. The other tiles below and above disappear. When you click on the tile again, it smoothly animates back to its position and the tiles above and below come into view. How is this achieved?
What have I tried so far? Nothing, because it is a "where do I begin?" question.
This is probably an instance of a custom activity transition (and a particularly well polished one).
In general, you can use the overridePendingTransition() to specify an animation that must be run when the current activity is changed (a classic example is sliding in a new Activity from a direction, while the previous Activity exits in the opposite direction). However, these transitions generally do not share UI elements.
Chet Haase has done a few DevBytes (in particular this one) to "simulate" an activity transition that shares an UI element (i.e. a view) between the caller and called activities. For example, if you have a Gallery, and you click on an image to show it full-screen, you would probably want the image to "grow" smoothly until it occupies this new position. The trick to achieve this is to actually disable the standard transitions entirely and include in the Intent used to start the activity the information about the current position and dimensions of the view that you want to "share":
Intent subActivity = new Intent(this, PictureDetailsActivity.class);
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".left", screenLocation[0]);
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".top", screenLocation[1]);
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".width", v.getWidth());
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".height", v.getHeight());
startActivity(subActivity);
overridePendingTransition(0, 0);
Therefore, the new activity can extract this data, and with this information and the knowledge of where on the screen the view should end up, can build and execute an animation that simulates the desired effect.
This technique can be difficult to implement if you want a complex animation, so in Android L this was baked into the platform itself: Activity Transitions can handle this automatically and provide a few built-in animations to act on the remaining (i.e. non shared) views. For example, the explode transition seems to be very much like the one you describe.
Regarding layouts:
You might find it helpful to use hierarchy viewer, which offers a function to capture the layers of the UI and store them in a Photoshop file. This gives you a good idea how the layout of a particular app you are was created and what kind of views were used.
Regarding animations:
Checkout videos by Chet Haase and Romain Guy who discuss graphics and animations in detail.
You can start with the Android training guides.
This one is an overview of designing with media and animation, but this one uses a ViewPager to achieve the effect you want.
I am trying to make a fairly simple Android game. I am making a custom view: I am not using any buttons, rather, I am painting pixels on screen that represent buttons. The idea is that I have 3 screens:
A Main screen
A Play screen
An Instructions screen
The main menu has two "locations" to click on: one that says Play (via painted pixels) and another that says Instructions.
I am confused as to how these should be implemented. Right now, I have a Main activity that sets the content view to the Main screen (extends View) but I am confused as to how to go from that Main screen (View) to the Play or Instructions screen. I have read up on View, Activities and SurfaceView but without any luck in understanding.
Does anyone have any examples (with proper programming practices) to make a view interactive and show another View (potentially Activity that creates a View?) Thanks!
What you need are some basic Android game development tutorials. To get started, this short tutorial is well-arranged and covers a Main-Screen, which leads to a Game-Screen. It will definitely help you out to get started. I personally also like video-tutorials, that's why I would recommend this series of tutorials which is suitable for beginners, too. Finally this page shows a lot of Android gaming tutorials. That are my personal favorits as it comes to gaming tutorials for beginners, but you will find a lot of stuff out there in the web. Have fun!
Go Launcher have a nice first-time tutorial. it is very similar to Stock ICS first time run. I want to learn how to make the similar tutorial display at the first launch of my app. How can I implement this Transparent view (which interacts with screen objects) in my android app?
I was trying to do something similar using a transparent activity with a viewpager inside it. I wanted static 'tutorial' images that users could swipe through.
One of the answers to my question mentioned an interesting library (called ShowcaseView). It seems like it may be a good fit for your requirements as well.
https://github.com/Espiandev/ShowcaseView
You can either use a FrameLayout or RelativeLayout as root of your Activity/Fragment, and put your "first time" View upon content with a (almost) transparent background, or use another Activity/Fragment themed with a transluscent window. (like this)
I'd rather use an Activity/Fragment, but this is up to you!
I wrote little library That contains a simple component for making a app tour. It`s very restricted to my case but maybe could be your case . Single LessonCardView Showed onstartactivity for the first time or on button click Any criticism ,help or advice will be appreciated. thanks https://github.com/dnocode/DnoLib
You can implement a first-time user guide with the Spotlight library by TakuSemba.
It is similar to the one shared above and it is still well-maintained (as of 2021).
https://github.com/TakuSemba/Spotlight