I am relatively new to Android development, and am developing an application with an image for a background. I need the ability to have text reliably and precisely placed in relation to certain points on the background image. I developed the application debugging on a Droid Charge. Everything looks fine there. However, I downloaded the application to a Droid X, and the text is a little off. I imagine I am missing some fundamental understanding about Android development, and would appreciate any help. Also, I believe this person is having a similar problem.
Screen sizes and precise element placement on Android
Well you need to understand that due to support of multiple screen, it's not wise to have a certain points or coordinates to draw your Views. If you want to draw a text according to a background position, then may be you should use a custom View where the background picture can work as the Background of your custom view and then you can place the text at the exact location.
Another idea would be to use a 9 patch drawable which is not stretchable (Background uses 9 patch drawable which stretches on changing the size of the view). However you have to supply different drawable for different screen densities then. I'd choose the first option, as it's easier.
PS: Tell me in comment, if you find any difficulty on applying any of the option.
Related
In my project, I have a 3x3 TableLayout consisting of nine different Buttons. Each Button has an image drawable above it and a small string of text below it. To be clear, the drawable and text are the Buttons using the "drawableTop" and "android:text" variables defined in XML.
I'd like to know that if it would be possible to move the drawable and the text closer together because the UI looks a bit off on big screened phones.
App on Nexus 4
App on Nexus 6
I realize that I will have to make different XML layout files for small phones, phones, small tablets and big tablets. But Nexus 6 is, as I classify it, a phone so I will probably not be making a separate layout file for it.
Any feedback helps unless you tell me that I need to use a LinearLayout with an ImageButton and TextView in it because I've already tried that and it didn't turn out that well.
When it comes to this, I usually use two views, one for the text and one for the image and put them into a ViewGroup, which then gets assigned onClickListener. This gives me more freedom and customization with the downside of lowering performance a bit.
But to answer your question, you can use android:drawablePaddingin conjunction with android:paddingTop to control the space between the image and the text.
Well the simple answer is probably mess around worth the text view's top padding. If that's not working for you the other solution is using the relative layout which is intended for such cases. That way you can keep the visual effect you're looking for while keeping the layout structure flat which is good for performance.
I am newbi in android world and working on an android app.
I have used many of buttons and image buttons in my app.
Now i want to replace them with an background image. (So i can make nice gui easily)
I know i can use view listener and i can find the clicked x and y coordinate from onclick method.
But I want to how can i find which part of the image was clicked. Because different phones have different resolutions how can i do this efficiently ?
And one more thing, Is it good to handle gui this way ?
Thanks !
You first need to set the initial window width and height before execution of other code and load an image of quality based on the screen size. so for example you can have 3 sets of images of different size. One for 5 inch screens and below. Another for 7 inch tablets. Another for 10 and possibly another super high quality image for anything above. As many devices coming on in the near future are reaching resolutions much higher then previously developed for. Just run code initially that detects the initial window size at hand and load image based on resolution of that device. From their program as you plan to.
Also to jump on answer above. Detect rotation event and adjust image accordingly. and update accordingly. You are adding more programming of course but no reason what you are asking could not be done. Just a few extra events detection and you should be good to go to accomplish exactly what you are looking to do
AFAIK it is not good practice to handle the GUI this way. Mostly because android screen size is not standard and so you can never be sure that it will work perfectly in all the devices. You can ofcourse handle the events using onTouchListener and see which part of image was clicked from the coordinates in the MotionEvent Object. But, I would not recommend doing so.
Creating layouts of different screen sizes and handling the events using Buttons and ImageButtons will be good.
you can use android:background attribute for background images in the layout xml files...
however you also can set the background of UI element programatically
As you can see in the photo I have a scaling problem with my design. Actually there is two problems. One involving a textview and one about scaling. I found out that the easiest solution for layout was to implement a background image to my RelativeLayout. (This may be a stupid approach i don't know.)
As you can see in the images, the text changes position on textview.setText("blabla"). And is creating visual problem. How would I go about fixing this?
Secondly, how would I solve the scaling issue on different devices? My initial plan was to make one background for each size. Like mdpi, hdpi and so on.. But how do I tell the app to choose between background? And is this even possible?
Am I doing it all wrong? :)
Positioning problem http://chk.no/bue/stackoverflow.png
I want my app to run on a wide variety of android devices in portrait only. I have a whole-screen background image that includes borders for other components. I want to place items like listviews/sponsor ads accurately within those borders... overlay them on top of the background in exactly the right place. Is using Framelayout the best/easiest way to do this? How do I make sure I get the listviews or sponsor ads in exactly the right place, and exactly the right size given that the background will be stretched to different dimensions for different devices? I've considered cutting up the background image instead but that seems like more work. What's the best approach? Thanks for any thoughts!
Unfortunately, this scheme is never going to work consistently across all screen sizes. If you want borders, you need to create 9-patch graphics out of those and assigne them as teh background to the UI item.
I am wondering what would be the best practice for android. To draw or to load an image?
For example I want to have a circle that is green filled with the text 25 in it.
-Should I have it in .PNG image file and just load it to the imageview placeholder when I need it?
OR should I load it in Java (by determining the position in java and load it from my res folder)?
OR Should I draw it (draw a circle, fill color, add text field inside)?
On another note, to have a checkmark, what do advise me to do?I don't even know how to draw that
I really need your help in this
Thank you so much
I'd actually argue that there is a single right answer. You should use a shape with a set color and text view inside it. It is easy to do what you've described in xml, see: Oval Gradient in Android for an example (there are a number if you google for android shapes). This will be less CPU/memory intensive than loading a bitmap, and more importantly, it will work for and look good on every screen size. As an added bonus of the user has changed their default font sizes, a textView/shape can respect that and a static image can not. Just set the background of your TextView to be the shape drawable (either in xml or programatically).
To get a bitmap to look good on multiple devices (a must for android development) , you will need a number of different versions of the same bitmap at different resolutions (XHDPI, HDPI, MDPI... etc).
Check marks are harder because they don't conform to a standard shape. Those you probably will have to make pngs for.
It depends on what you want to do.
Rendering a bitmap will be faster, but you cannot manipulate it after it is drawn.
So, for your case, you have a green circle with 25 written it. Do you also need a green ball with 23 and another with 24 in it? What about other colors?
It really depends on the amount of variation you need. At a certain point the overhead of using dozens of images will not be worth the evert of drawing to a canvas. Or, depending on how complex the images are, it will be.
The question is not "Which is better?", but instead, "Which is better for what I need to do?"
I'm not an expert on Android development but after seeing your question I have done a bit of reading and came across this article on displaying images with android that is relevant and includes some code to possibly help you out. http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/07/android-game-development-displaying.html
As for your image of a check mark, why dont you just go into photoshop or paint and use the line tool to draw a checkmark and then fill it in with color and save it as a .png perhaps?