I am currently trying to get the look of my app right. But I am having problems figuring out how to even set up a way to change themes. For one thing, is there even a way to change styles through code? I checked the method list and I saw nothing. This leads me to my actual question; is there a way that, like CSS, in which you style the parent, and then have it trickle down but also changed depending on the View? I looked at the Android docs, and they did not show any examples of this. Hopefully someone can give me an idea as to how to accomplish this, or if its not possible, to let me know that as well. Thanks in advance.
You should be able to do this using styles and themes. I've implemented this using Jake whartons Sherlock action bar. (I'm not certain if it's necessary) It involves using the comparability library which gives you the ability to use fragments and loaders as well. Look at his democode at http://actionbarsherlock.com/download.html. Look for where themes are mentioned and you will find the information you need. In the demo app you can change the theme in the top right corner and see how it affects the activities look and feel. It also shows many of the features available and the code to write them. I have found this an invaluable resource and it should show you how to theme your app.
Related
Is there a library for creating Floating Action Buttons with labels (similar to the Evernote app)?
Evernote Screenshot
The popular libraries seem to be
https://github.com/futuresimple/android-floating-action-button (closest to what I want... ability to expand hide "sub" actions)
https://github.com/makovkastar/FloatingActionButton (Primary function is to hide/show with a scrollview, recyclerview, or listview)
https://github.com/oguzbilgener/CircularFloatingActionMenu (library which has been around pre-lollipop)
Neither of these, to my knowledge, have this capability. Before re-inventing the wheel, has somebody already done this?
This feature request ended up being implemented in https://github.com/futuresimple/android-floating-action-button. This includes labels on both the left and right sides.
If you're interested, see the discussion here: https://github.com/futuresimple/android-floating-action-button/issues/22#issuecomment-66155108
Disclaimer: I haven't used this (yet).
I'd recommend this library over others that I've seen.
Nowadays there are available techniques of manipulating behaviour of the view that enable you to program FloatinActionButton as you want and to have joy that you have made it by yourself!
Fade in/out FloatingActionButton while scrolling RecyclerView . DETAILS
Slide down/up , beside it blog says how to:
Expand floatingActionButton and show subFloatingButtons. DETAILS HERE
There is to much details, "how to do". Therefore I've attached just links to blogs. Anyway I encourage you guys to take a look at those blogs. You will have total control over your application. Currenty I use all solutions from both blog's. Enjoy!
Especially the last library you mentioned looks quite sophisticated. To my knowledge, you can set any kind of View you want to be shown as a Button.
This View could simply be a custom-view of yours that shows an image as well as a label.
In case anyone is still looking for this functionality: I made an Android library that has this ability and much more, called ExpandableFab (https://github.com/nambicompany/expandable-fab).
The Material Design spec refers to this functionality as 'Speed Dial' and ExpandableFab implements it along with many additional features.
Nearly everything is customizable (colors, text, size, placement, margins, animations and more) and optional (don't need an Overlay, or FabOptions, or Labels, or icons, etc). Every property can be accessed or set through XML layouts or programmatically - whatever you prefer.
Written 100% in Kotlin but comes with full JavaDoc and KDoc (published API is well documented). Also comes with an example app so you can see different use cases with 0 coding.
Github: https://github.com/nambicompany/expandable-fab
Library website (w/ links to full documentation): https://nambicompany.github.io/expandable-fab/
I am in a situation like i have to generate UI Controls like Button,Switcher,Progress Bar, Label text etc based on my list Items .
I am looking for a way to generate the controls in a View and add Views with generated controls in a Layout .
Can anyone give me a proper way to do that?
Why not to use Fragments?
Google docs about this here
and little tutorial here
You may want to take a look at the Metawidget source code. The Android version of Metawidget makes extensive use of generating Views and Layouts at runtime (e.g. see org.metawidget.android.widget.widgetbuilder.AndroidWidgetBuilder). You may even find Metawidget itself will suit your needs (it's designed to be embedded into projects for use-cases such as this).
I'm trying to do minor tweaks to the layout of items inside an ActionBar, and hitting a lot of problems. It would help if I knew (or even better: could override!) the layout which Android is using for the ActionBar itself.
(Android's layout system doesn't allow you to fully control layout of "items" direct from the item itself - all the options are enabled/disabled based on what type the parent/container layout has)
So, for instance...
try to make a custom ActionView that takes "all remaining space" (because you have no title / don't need a title)
...everything breaks. There are lots of workarounds, all of which have their own bugs (I've tried 3 from SO already, and they all break on different versions of Android / different handsets)
this would be TRIVIAL if I could set the ActionBar's layout to "RelativeLayout" and use "layout_toLeftOf" etc
...but the docs don't seem to answer this, nor do they provide a way of setting it. Any ideas? I don't want to have lots of hardcoded, broken code to workaround the API (because it'll make maintaining this app a nightmare :( )
Have you looked at ActionBarSherlock? It's a support library extension that implements action bar on all versions of Android using single API. Also, when it comes to layouts, I often find it very useful to look at the source code. You can find action bar layouts on the very top of the list here.
Load the view hierarchy and then you will be able to see the views that compose any layout.
http://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-ui.html
I am working on an application that involves me having to place a toolbar at the bottom of each activity. The toolbar will have 4 buttons on it, each starting new activities.
I am just wondering, and I apologize for how general the question, is there a proper way to go about implementing this? my plan was to but a linear layout element in each xml layout file with horizontal orientation. Then four button elements inside of that...
It seems like a huge amount of work considering I will have a lot of activities..
What you want sounds a lot like Android's ActionBar. Check this link for a guide to its usage. If you use this, your app will look and feel more consistent with the operating system, as so many apps now use the ActionBar (which is a lot of them), and you gain a lot of power for what you want to show there, and how you want to do it.
ActionBar was only introduced in Android version 3 (Honeycomb), but there's a compatibility library, ActionBarSherlock which allows you to use it in older versions of Android as well.
Hope it works for you!
You can use a same xml for various views. So I suggest creating a generic xml, then using Inflaters and other resources as strings, xmls etc. to prepare the generic xml whenever any Activity is loaded. So you can reuse it the xml.
There are lots of way to style ListViews to give them elegant look, but all of them involve modyfying the adapter or writing additional code.
With the release of Android 4.0, unfortunetely things have to change. Google polished their Holo theme and gave it new look. All of the developers are now encouraged to use it, in order to make all apps look the same.
And here's the problem. Google rolled out 4.0, but there are still people using older Android versions. We can't just leave our previous custom application themes and use Holo, because it will ruin visual experience for users with older devices. And we can't force 4.0 users just to use Holo, because let's be honest - it's still not perfect.
The goal is to use builtin themes system and prepare some alternatives for Holo, which will look great on all devices. Then we can just switch between Holo and our themes with just setTheme() and no additional problems. Unfortunetely it's not that simple. We are limited to the capabilities of existing theme system and some things are just hard to do. And here comes my question.
Taking everything I've mentioned into consideration, how can we control ListView look? I'm not able to figure out, how to:
create list with rounded corners and make sure the selector background doesn't ruin it when selecting first/last element
create rounded corners not for the list but sections separated by headers, something like here:
The solution should affect ListViews created by PreferenceActivity without any additional lines of code. Everything should be contained in the theme:
<theme name="SampleTheme" parent="android:Theme">
...
</theme>
I kindly ask not to post solutions that do not use styles & themes. They can be easily found in another questions, here on Stack Overflow.
Thanks in advance.
I can see two ways to solve this.
One is simply to use a theme for your listviews specifying the background, which in turn is a 9 patch with rounded corners or an xml shape you specify (with rounded corners as well). This will have the side-effect of the listview row selector appearing 'over' the background you specified, therefore kind of spoiling the effect. It is quite straightforward to implement though.
The second option is to simply always add headers and footers to your listviews, which have backgrounds that are selectors with rounded corners on top (and bottom). You can specify styles for these as well if you really want to.
Sorry for this last comment, but I had to say it. Please don't try to make your app look like an iPhone app :)