I did search the internet to find an answer to my questions but there are no websites that did help me, so I hope someone can! Thank you in advance and have a nice day :-)
So these days I've been busy to get more into the Android Design guidelines and to learn more about it and how to implement it in my future applications. This is the main website I use to see what the guidelines are: http://developer.android.com/design/index.html. Great website but there are a few small things I just can't find in the dev guide or somewhere else. I just don't know how to implement some (simple) UI elements.
Can someone provide me code snippets of the following questions? (I want to know how to do it as simple as possible, how Google ment it!) It can help other (starting) developers too!
My main question is, are there special elements to achieve these things? As they are the key element in Android 4.0 it should have this things as some standard right?
1) Android 4.0 is using titles with dividers a lot in there new theme and it's looking great. But I can't find how to do implement this element simple like it should. What I want to know is how to make this blue title text with the grey looking divider underneath it look at this picture:
2) How to make section dividers in general? Like this image:
3) How to make a list with section dividers and give a list-item a 2-line explanation under it's name like this:
I did search the internet to find an answer to my questions but there are no websites that did help me, so I hope someone can! Thank you in advance and have a nice day :-)
In most cases how you are going to have to do it is create a custom layout. I tried recreating the look of the people application this way. for the most part the look you are going for is similar to the PreferenceActivityview. That gives you the look of the last image and probably how it was done in the People application with some extra programming. I just found it easier to create my own layout though instead of trying to mess around with that.
To my knowledge there is nothing in the api to create what you are looking to do easily and custom layout are going to be the way to go.
the custom dialog layout like you show in the beginning is very simple to do so if you dont know how to do manipulate layouts I would start there. look up the android color swatches to get the color of that blue
Edit
another thing you could do is look through the People source code and see how they did it but it will probably be more of a pain than what its worth when you can just do a layout
Related
I'll start with the fact that I'm quite new to Android
app development and I came across a real App screen, that I thought will be a good practice to convert to XML.
Although I successfully copied some parts of it, I believe I lack a little bit of knowledge to achieve that goal. So I hope to learn from your answers.
Please keep the answer as clean as possible since I wish to learn forward from it.
Thanks in advance!
NOTE:
1) The icons on the gray line are clickable.
2) the X on the light blue line is clickable and deletes the line.
So, I create for you quick demo app(it is not as good as for commerce practice). How it looks and works from inside you may see here in GitHub repo. Hope I help you!
Things you try to avoid:
hardcoded text & colors in XML
not consistent id-naming
none-dimensional code *, for example like this - android:textSize="16sp"
* - I mean use dimens.xml, for instance - android:textSize="#dimen/default_input_text_size"
I will recommend you read a great book:
Clean Code - Robert Martin
Also, I support #FrancislainyCampos post. You should try to read also about design and develop tools to think and do more consistently with Google recommendations.
Although I've heard of some new tools that proclaim to be able to automate the task of converting design screens to xml, I don't think that's wide spread around the Android community yet. I think the best tip for you here is just to actually type each element on the screen not converting it but making the layout happen. There's a few tutorials on how to use Constrainst Layout to achieve that on Youtube. I'd also suggest this course here on Udacity that explains the step by step on creating your first screens for Android.
Hope that helps.
Is there any way, specifically in android studio, to see what one's custom dialog would look like without actually running the application? It seems that the Design view of layouts account only for entire-screen designs. It also seems that sometimes the way the "dialog" looks in the design view is wildly different than the way they look live.
I would share some of my code, I know you guys love that, but this isn't exactly a coding question, is it?
You can use third party tools and mirrors. I think the closest you can get is by checking this out.
This is hot swapping in general and you get interactive previews but like I said it is the closest you can get. I haven't worked thoroughly with it but I think this should be what you are looking for.
I'm building a app and I want to create grouping of my settings for the app, like you can do with a Preference Screen. I'm using the Support Design Library to be able to use Floating Labels and so on.
I've been searching like crazy but can't seem to find any answer...
Hope someone here knows how to do this and can help, and hope you understand what I want to do, despite my rusty english :)
I would like the below image but not using the "PreferenceActivity".
Thanks in advance.
The following is my instructions page for the application that is being worked upon. For now I am just display this image via the ImageView using the scaleXY property to make it pan out throughout the screen. I do know that this is a very lame approach to making a tutorials page ... So can someone please tell me how can I correctly implement this tutorials page in my application ? Thanks in advanced.
This here looks like it can help you.
You're current method works, but I think you'll find this alternative much more preferable.
The ShowcaseView library is designed to highlight and showcase specific parts of apps to the user with a distinctive and attractive overlay. This library is great for pointing out points of interest for users, gestures, or obscure but useful items.
https://github.com/Espiandev/ShowcaseView
I'm writing a new app for android and I would like to implement also a first launch tutorial. In particular, the tutorial has to be interactive. Basically, after a user registers to the service, a minimum settings will be required.
I'd like something like today we have into Google Apps, like Sheets, Docs and so far. The exception there is that those tutorials have the aim to explain how the app works. Here I want to have something where user can input some data.
I was looking at ShowcaseView but seems to be deprecated and old in style.
So here the question is: what is the best way to implement that? ViewPager?
I also had a look to this other question, but it did not help too much.
Any advice is really appreciated.
EDIT: I have found this other nice alternative. AppIntro It seems what I was looking for. :)
There are few I found by quick searching Github:
https://github.com/Seishin/showcaseview-android
https://github.com/worker8/TourGuide
https://github.com/amlcurran/ShowcaseView
I'm pretty sure you can find the right one for you ;)
You can do it in several ways that really depends on you and your app. Basically you can create a "Boarding" experience with ViewPager that will go thru the main screen of your app (with static images for example) where you explain the user what goes on in your app. The other way way is an interactive tutorial as the user already landed into your app - you can achieve this with something like Showcase (I'm pretty sure that there are libs on GitHub that are still maintained).
I would recommend Roman Nuriks Wizard Pager code on Github as a starting point. It's not so much a library as a sample code showing you how to do what you want.
The general approach is to use a ViewPager with some form of navigation buttons to move the user forwards and backwards through the pager Fragments.
https://github.com/romannurik/Android-WizardPager