Develop Reference

Android - Create a view that includes the entire screen

I am not the best at android programming so please correct any errors I make.
According to this developer.android.com.
Android view is:
This class represents the basic building block for user interface
components. A View occupies a rectangular area on the screen and is
responsible for drawing and event handling. View is the base class for
widgets, which are used to create interactive UI components (buttons,
text fields, etc.).
However, I have not found an article about how to get a full view. I mean as in an entire screen as a view. The image I used below is to show what I want to include in that view. I want to include everything on screen. Everything On that Screen. (I can't repeat enough). It includes the chat heads, background, and menu bar. Everything that is on screen.
I can't figure out how to get a view like that from a service or from an activity. Any help is appreciated. I don't have exact code because I don't know how to do this.
Edit:
I know that I am very bad at explaining, so if you are confused, I am going to explain what I want to do with my view.
So basically, I want to make a screen tapper that taps for you so you can king of "cheat" games like cookie clicker. Therefore I need a view that contains the entire screen so then I can fake "touches" on the screen.
Hope this cleared any confusion

So you have a few things to deal with. Generally, the menu bar (and possibly soft-key buttons on the bottom) will remain visible. However, you can hide the menu bar:
hide the top menu bar in my android device & Tablet
You may want gestures to allow users to see it. Or, since it appears you are building a game, you just leave it hidden until they hit "home" or "back" or "exit" or whatever.
The "chat heads" are a horrible idea, but some developers think they are awesome. You can see more about that here:
Creating a system overlay window (always on top)
You might find something like this will work (but if new notifications pop-up, it may not help):
http://goobbe.com/questions/1390940/how-to-close-cancel-dismiss-a-system-dialog-programmatically-android

Can this PageAdapter behaviour be achieved in iOS?

On Twitter for Android there is a bar at the top of the display where the user can swipe left and right between three different screens: Home, Discover and Activity (see image 1).
As they do so, the small blue line moves in real time to underneath the name of the screen that has been selected (see image 2).
When the user scrolls downwards, the entire bar collapses to the size of the blue line and it remains that way until the user scrolls up again.
Can this be achieved in xCode, ideally in Storyboard? If not, what is the best alternative?
Apologies for the massive images...

I have built this as an ios feature before (also an android dev so I know where you are coming from).
Here is the DIY way;
Use a UIScrollView and with the pagingEnabled property set to YES. Typically a UIPageControl is used along with it.
Here is a Library that does it for you;
https://github.com/monsieurje/ICViewPager
Hope this has answered all your problems.

Android layout design for many menu options

What is the best way to go about designing an Android application that features quite a bit of formulas and conversions? I was thinking that multiple Activities with ListViews sort of like a tree with the leaves being the actual calculations. However, after reading Android design principles it's better to avoid a pure navigational structure and try to reduce the deepness of the app.
For example:
Main Menu
Conversions
Weight
Distance
Distance - Speed - Time
Calculate air speed
Calculate distance traveled
Weather
METAR
TAF
So by the 3rd or 4th screen we've reached the actual individual calculator. Does this make sense? And if it does, is there a better way of designing this (maybe using action bars or tabs)?

By using a very simple UI concept of Expandable Listviews, in which there is more than one child row for each section of the parent row, by tapping on the "Conversions", could expand into sub-rows, likewise for each section as you see fit, and treat that as a Main Menu in a sense of a word, that is, your main application screen.
The nice advantage is that the nesting of the menus in the Android way, is eliminated and can accomodate as many as you wish.

The third or forth screen sounds like it's too deep down the rabbit hole, how about instead having multiple tabs for each "type"?
For example;
[Conversions][Distances][Weather]
If you add an ActionBar to it, you could have a type of filter as the GMAIL app has (where you select the account) and use it to toggle the different "modes" so to speak.
Another approach would be to have it all in one screen, just that you switch the active layout (or perhaps Fragment) via the filter I mentioned above.
Check out the GMAIL app, and you'll see what I mean in terms of the filter. :-)

Three listviews in one screen

I have an app on iPhone with cascading design like on the picture, and I'd like to port it to Android. Is there a simple and recommended way to do this?
The section menu on the left (Section A, B,C,D) is the first that the user needs to select, then the user needs to pick a category in the middle (all, popular, pc, xbox,...), then he is presented with a list of articles for chosen category.
I could imagine doing it with three ListViews, but then the app could also listen to a swipe gesture to make the rightmost ListView "full screen", and hide the first two listviews. I could implement a swipe listener for the whole activity and set first two listviews' visibility to hidden, right?
Are my assumptions correct and would this be the right way to do this?

It could definetly work the way you explain it - if the design is good is another discussion. Personally I'm not a fan of throwing in endless amounts of data in one screen, when the space is as limited as it is on most mobile phones (I would probably do it with 3 different screens with a ListView on each)
Implementing the mentioned swipe gesture is doable and you could certainly just hide the two other ListViews with the function setVisibility( View.GONE ).
Hope it helps.

You might want to use the new fragments API, it's specifically built for this kind of thing (and it's compatible all the way down to Android 1.6). Also, as KasperMoerch says, putting all that info on a small screen can get ugly. Using fragments will make it easier for you to gradually increase the amount of information displayed as the screen size increases.
I'm not sure you can just listen for a swipe gesture over an entire activity like that. I think you have to wrap the fragments in a custom view (for example an extended LinearLayout) and do the swipe listening there. However, achieving a finger-tracking animation (i.e. where the rightmost pane follows the finger precisely as it swipes across) is a pretty daunting task (I wouldn't really know where to begin, probably in the custom view though). The best way (I think) to do it is to make a compromise and just start an animation (right-to-left slide) when you detect a swipe. However, the simplest solution is to not animate at all.
You can also take into consideration dropping the swipe gesture altogether and just providing an "expand" button.

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.