Develop Reference

Dynamic UI Controls in Android

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).

Android interface : show form like the grouped listview style?

I'm building an App for Android that already exists for iOS. On iOS, we really like to use the listview grouped style to show details and forms. It is really useful to show details of objects that we don't know how much properties they have before loading it.
I know that Android doesn't have a similar tableview style. And I don't want to use a custom library to recreate it, because I don't want to force an iOS like interface to my Android's users.
But how would you create a consistent Android interface that show similar information? Do you have example for me?

First of all, your instinct to not force iOS style UI onto Android users is correct and I respect you for it.
Android's ListView is roughly the equivalent of iOS's UITableView. There are important differences. For instance, you should never use a ListView inside another scrollable container. If a ListView is in a particular layout, it should (usually) be the only scrollable component. If you want multiple ListViews in a layout, you probably don't want ListViews at all. You should instead use (vertical) LinearLayouts and add the items in order.
Cyril Mottier writes excellent posts on implementing custom behavior for Android's ListView.

If you want to display data in a list then you can use the ListView. Here is a great article about how to use it.

How to create an info overlay in Android

I am looking for a way to create a short overlay intro of an app to display to first time users. These posts gave me some understanding of how it can be done, but not entirely:
How do I create a help overlay like you see in a few Android apps and ICS?
How to use LayoutInflater / ViewStub for an overlay
I do not understand how to access my elements correctly, since my root layout element is a LinearLayout that includes an Actionbar and a ViewPager instead of containing actual elements.
Are there any frameworks that does this for you?

I think that this library : ShowcaseView is your best option.
As its name implies, it allows you to recreate the Android 4.x showcase view; ie :
.
The documentation of the project explains how to implement it.
Word of advice though : this kind of explanation view is viewed as bad design most of the time : if your application is well designed, you don't need to provide a tutorial to the user, it is supposed to be intuitive.
It can be totally justified in some cases of course, just be sure that :
-your users really need a tutorial.
-it is not because you are doing something opposite to the Android convetions.

Have a look at MaterialShowcaseView. It inherits from ShowcaseView and is up-to-date.

Custom controls in android

I'm new to android and need to create what in .net would be called a custom control. But I have two questions:
some articles refer to them as custom controls others custom componnets and other custom widgets. What should I be looking up?
Most questions on this topic are simply refered this page http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/custom-components.html which is just a view class and is a bit like being handed a chinese dictionary when asked how to write chinese and told everything you need is there. Although true, I'm looking for a simple example something like an odd shapped button with one even attached to it. Surely there must be one such example?

If you really need custom view - look this document. But easier way - customize existing components, by providing specific backgrounds and providing special events.

Android Tweetdeck-like UI

I'm getting started with Android development, and I would like to have an interface similar to that of tweetdeck: there are several workspaces (activities) that are laid out left to right, and the user can switch between them with a horizontal gesture. The same way the Android desktops are switched.
In tweetdeck there are also dots in the titlebar, that indicate on which side and how many workspaces there are.
Is it a standard Android interface, or something custom built? How do I do something like this?

How you go about this is going to be partially dependent on the content you want to present. If there are going to be many heavyweight pages you'll want to look into doing something like a custom AdapterView. If there are only a few fixed pages such as in the stock home screen you can treat it like a scrollable view with some custom logic to handle snapping to pages.
Here's a link to the custom view that implements this in the stock Android launcher. The bits you're interested in will mostly be in onTouchEvent, onInterceptTouchEvent, and computeScroll.
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Launcher2/+/master/src/com/android/launcher2/Workspace.java

Take a look at ViewFlipper: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ViewFlipper.html

In addition to studying the actual Android code (referenced in another answer), some folks have extracted and isolated the workspace (Launcher2) code into a re-usable view group. You can find the work in github here https://github.com/olibye/AndroViews