Develop Reference

How to display randomly scattered textviews (like in Apple presentation feature lists)?

Say you've a list of Strings. The number of Strings varies. Is there a way to randomly display these strings like in an Apple presentation when they show a bunch of features in a slide. See link for an example.
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2011/06/10/iphone-5-feature-hinted-at-in-ios-5-wwdc-presentation/
So, text is randomly scattered but never overlaps. Spacing is pretty even. Some text is dim, some is bolder, big, small, etc. I couldn't find the 'name' of this effect (or these multiple combined effects) if there even is one?
I assume they do it manually in a slide of course, but I was wondering if there was a known way of doing this programmatically.
Any help would be much appreciated!

Issues designing Android UI in Xamarin

I am in the process of writing my first android app. I figured, for a simple exercise, I'd write an app to keep score in bowling.
I want to create a picture of the pins, with a touch toggling a pin between standing, and fallen. Then an ok button, that completes the shot. After each shot is entered, have a picture of the score updated.
Then, I want to be able to click on a frame, and edit it...mistakes happen.
This seemed simple enough. At least if I were to whip up something in HTML5 I would be done by now.
However, I'm struggling with just drawing the UI...ugh.
Would I just create the pins as image buttons? And how do I align them properly...I can't seem to drag stuff where I want, it's all left aligned and stacked. Nothing like it should look.
And how can I dynamically create images for buttons? At least that's how I was thinking I would do the score (showing all 10 frames with the shots and running score.
I realize this is a beginner question. But I've been at it for five hours, and I'm no farther along.

I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare your speed in a dev environment you are new to with one you already know - you are bound to be slower in the new one.
To get more familiar with android's XML layouts, I recommend you take a look through some of the tutorials on layouts - on linearlayout, gridlayout, relativelayout, etc which I think will have you quickly working in XML to generate your ui.
One such tutorial is http://slodge.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/an-mono-for-android-wrappanelflowlayout.html
Once you've learnt a bit about the XML, I suspect you'll also find the designer easier too.
For the questions about the pins, well these sound a lot like checkboxes, only drawn differently - so check out:
Custom checkbox image android
http://vimaltuts.com/android-tutorial-for-beginners/android-custom-checkbox

dynamically configuring views for a ViewPager widget?

First let me say that I'm very new to android development (although I have a good understanding of the basics of java), and I am building a magazine reader app for a campus publication I work for.
I want to display each article using a ViewPager widget. I'm going to build a java program which enables the magazine editor to post articles in .txt format onto a server, along with images associated with each, and have the android app periodically download these articles to a local folder.
I'm a little confused about how to construct the views for each ViewPager from the text files. Somehow my logic needs to determine the size of the screen running the app, in order to know how many words can fit on each screen.
Is this right, or am I fundamentally misunderstanding ViewPager somehow? If so, how might I structure the program to configure the views dynamically based on the txt + images given to it?

From what I understand, each page will contain as much of the article as possible, and when the user selects the article they will be able to see the entire thing. Something like this, but so it fills up the entire screen?
If this is the case, you have two options here:
Just ellipsize the textview so that it ends with a "..." at the end. Probably the preferred solution.
Resize the TextView to fit all your text (Auto Scale TextView Text to Fit within Bounds).
EDIT:
Here's a different interpretation of your question.
From what I understand, you're trying to have something like an eBook reader with an undefined number of pages; kind of what Flipboard does:
Basically, once all the text fills in the entire area you want to have it continue to the next page.
The easiest way to do this, if you do not need native performance, would be to just use a WebView, split the text across several columns, and have only one column be visible at a time.
However, it is certainly possible to calculate how tall the entire text would be and then split it up accordingly; i.e. Pagination in Android TextView
It seems similar questions have been asked and addressed: Splitting a TextView into multiple TextViews relative to screen height (see the accepted answer).

Android Text Display - Canvas.drawText() output pixelated

My Android app displays text in a few different ways, and there are some annoying differences between them I was hoping folks could help with.
When I use display methods that might be termed "automatic," the text is displayed very nicely. By automatic methods, I'm referring tools, like Toasts and Button widgets where I just have supply the text, and the OS (or "environment" or whatever) displays it for me. The letters are nicely curved, pleasant to look at, and easily legible.
However, in my code where I handle the text display (using Canvas.drawText() in a Surface Runner View), the text quality is poor. The text is still legible, but it looks pixelated. The letters just don't look their best.
I've tried experimenting with Paint.setTypeface(), using Typeface.SANS_SERIF for example, but the quality of the display when it's my code is always poor. Doable, but poor.
Has anybody else experienced this? By any chance does anybody have a solution?

You might also try playing around with Paint.setAntiAlias(boolean) or Paint.setSubpixelText(boolean).

Problem in Android Game using AndEngine

Hey all,
I am having an unusual problem with my Game. I am loading six textures in my Game, the initial one is a type of Game Background. Now at click of a Sprite i load a Dialog with infalted XML. The problem occurs here, when it first loads my game Background becomes black, when it reloads again it returns to it's original, when it reloads again it's black and it continues like this. It's a big code and that's why i cannot post it here, may be any one of you help me in this. I am stuck since many days in this, I have not unloaded any Texture, but still it's looking like that...............
Hope to get some help from you all..................
Thanks............

Try copying your game to another project and keep removing stuff to narrow down the problem until you don't have the problem anymore. I'd start with removing textures.
How many textures of what size do you have?

This is my raw guess.
you could have kept the Dialog's inflated xml root layer's(linearlayout) height and width as fill_parent. This could have occupied the entire screen and let things black.
make it as wrap_content to both.

1024x600 Textures are impossible! Both dimensions have to be a power of two, AndEngine does not accept other dimensions as many (all?) devices would not allow this.
Sorry but my time is currently very limited (due to exams =( ).

kkkkk SO it's a very delayed answer but still, may be it may help others. I exactly don't know what the problem was but after removing a texture, making size of some other's small, and also when android got updated, the problem is now very delayed, or it rarely comes.
So as per what i can think there seems only two issues, some memory prob or some bug in android which resolved with new update.