Hello i use ActionBarSherlock Version 4.0.0 and i dont know how to change/style the title text, under version 3.5 i used #style/abTextStyle.
but that doenst work in version 4.0.0.
ABS 4 brought with it some major improvements, one being the styling via XML. If you read the documentation on styling, you would know that as of 4.0 -
Due to limitations in Android's theming system any theme
customizations must be declared in two attributes. The normal
android-prefixed attributes apply the theme to the native action bar
and the unprefixed attributes are for the custom implementation. Since
both theming APIs are exactly the same you need only reference your
customizations twice rather than having to implement them twice.
<style name="Theme.Styled" parent="Theme.Sherlock.Light.DarkActionBar">
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
<item name="android:actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
</style>
From this we can see that the ABS item reflects the native exactly, obviously without the android prefix.
This in short means that styling the native and ABS actionbar is now much simpler and to do any styling you should follow the standard Android docs on this, and then declare the styling you want like the example above (i.e. declare twice, once for native once for ABS).
This question ActionBar text color has some examples for what you want in its top voted answer, and if you want to be comforted: it was commented on by Jake Wharton who is the genius behind ABS.
Related
I am new to android and have a question about the styles.xml file.
Each item for example this
<item name="android:background">#color/black</item>
works both with "android:background" and with just "background".
What is the android: prefix there for?
When creating your own styles, you should always extend an existing style from the framework or support library so that you maintain compatibility with platform UI styles. To extend a style, specify the style you want to extend with the parent attribute. You can then override the inherited style attributes and add new ones.
For example, you can inherit the Android platform's default text appearance and modify it as follows:
<style name="GreenText" parent="#android:style/TextAppearance">
<item name="android:textColor">#00FF00</item>
</style>
However, you should always inherit your core app styles from the Android Support Library.
But if you don't inherit them from the android support library then too things will work the same!
Source: Explanation text and code taken from: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/themes
You can read more about Styles and Themes from the above doc, from where I took the example to explain you!
Need to implement UI like in the following picture
What is the best way to do it? I found out about "material design" and PhoneGap. I'm new in android development, so i dont know the best practices and I want to choose best path to follow. What exact layouts I should use, RelativeLayout or TableLayout or other, how to apply styles to ui elements, borders, backgrounds and so on.
Should I use styles or build-in attributes? Can I find an example code somewhere, may be good tutorials or open-source applications? I found a lot of samples in a book by Deitels and in GitHub, but it's all look like native android ui, not like web or flat ui.
Flat Material UI design Android:
As per I understand from you question that you want the flat Material design for Android Native UI.
So for that please follow the below process:
Let’s jump right into two key features of material design: Themes and Colors!
Themes let you apply a consistent tone to an app, and developers can choose between dark or light themes (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).
Custom colors can also be defined using theme attributes which are then automatically used by the app for different components e.g colorPrimaryDark for the Status Bar and colorPrimary for the App Bar (see Figure 3 below).
Add the Light theme to our app and customize some of the colors in res/values/styles.xml
styles.xml
<resources>
<!-- Base application theme. -->
<style name="AppTheme.Base" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">
<!-- Customize your theme here. -->
<item name="colorPrimary">#3F51B5</item>
<!-- Light Indigo -->
<item name="colorPrimaryDark">#3949AB</item>
<!-- Dark Indigo -->
<item name="colorAccent">#00B0FF</item>
<!-- Blue -->
</style>
<style name="AppTheme" parent="AppTheme.Base"></style>
</resources>
The app should now look like this:
For more information clicks on the following link.
create an Android material design app
I'm quite confused about how styling in appcompat library works.
According to here:
We now use the support implementation of Toolbar/ActionBar on all
platforms meaning that we no longer read any android: attributes
related to the action bar.
For apps which already have existing appcompat setups, this means that
you should remove your v14+ themes which re-set the same values in the
android namespace. Please note, this is ONLY applicable for
styles/widgets which affect the action bar.
For most apps, you now only need one theme declaration, in values/
So here is my question:
If I want to use material design ActionBar in API 14+, I can just use ActionBar/Toolbar provided in appcompat_v7 and style it in the common value/ folder with the "android:" namespace removed ? but why am I seeing people writing code below:
<style name="MyTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
....
<item name="windowContentOverlay">#null</item>
<item name="android:windowContentOverlay">#null</item>
....
</style>
why is "android:" namespace there? what's the difference between the code above and using value-v21, value-v14, folders?
can someone explain or direct me to the right source?
Yes, if you use AppCompat v21+, you only need a single theme with a parent of Theme.AppCompat (or a subtheme such as Theme.AppCompat.Light) and you do not need the android: namespace attributes for action bar/window related flags, nor separate themes for v14, v20, etc. The full list of top level attributes which AppCompat provides across all API levels can be found in the AppCompat R.styleable Theme.
Much of the code on the internet (including parts of the developer.android.com site) are still written for the pre-v21 AppCompat, which did require both the android: and non-prefixed versions.
I recently started Android programming, all is good and dandy, but I've came across a problem that I couldn't find an answer to, and I really diged hard for 4 days so far.
My app uses support action bar, and to be specific "android.support.v7.app.ActionBarActivity". Long story short, I couldn't handle most of the stuff applicable to an Action Bar to this support one.
My app uses this support action bar by default due to setting up my mini sdk version to 14.
I want to be able to build an action bar from scratch, and customize it, since the default action bar is not responsive to my customization in styles.xml, etc.
I don't mind using Holo theme library instead of AppCompat.
So the question here, how can use Action Bar instead of Support Action Bar?
How can I extend my java class to use that instead of the support one?
Because none of the online customizing solutions are applicable to the support action bar.
A bit foggy description so I apologize for that.
Create a new project, and select the minimum API level as 15. When you do this, the appcompat-v7 library will not be required for this project as it is for projects with minSdkversion < 15. In this project, the classes android.app.ActionBarActivity and android.app.ActionBar will be used by default, i.e. the native AOSP classes and not the ones from the support library.
The following will let you have an ActionBar with custom background color as you want it, on API level 8 and above.
STEP 1. In your res/values folder, define an XML file theme.xml and add the following to it:
<resources
xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools">
<style name="DefaultActionBarTheme" parent="#style/Theme.AppCompat.Light">
<item name="android:actionBarStyle" tools:targetApi="11">#style/MyActionBar</item>
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/MyActionBar</item>
<item name="android:actionBarSize" tools:targetApi="11">#dimen/action_bar_wrap_content</item>
<item name="actionBarSize">#dimen/action_bar_wrap_content</item>
</style>
<style name="MyActionBar" parent="#style/Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionBar">
<item name="android:background" tools:targetApi="11">#color/actionbarbgcolor</item>
<item name="background">#color/actionbarbgcolor</item>
<item name="android:height" tools:targetApi="11">#dimen/action_bar_wrap_content</item>
<item name="height">#dimen/action_bar_wrap_content</item>
</style>
</resources>
In the same folder make another XML file colors.xml and add the following to it:
<resources>
<color
name="actionbarbgcolor">#00FF00
</color>
</resources>
and to the existing file dimens.xml, add the last line:
<resources>
<!-- Default screen margins, per the Android Design guidelines. -->
<dimen name="activity_horizontal_margin">16dp</dimen>
<dimen name="activity_vertical_margin">16dp</dimen>
<!-- Optional, in case you wish to increase the default width of the Action Bar. -->
<dimen name="action_bar_wrap_content">55dp</dimen>
</resources>
In place of #00FF00 above, use the hex color code for the background color you wish to use in your ActionBar.
NOTE: The above will work assuming you are using the appcompat-v7 library. If not, then you'll have to use one of the Holo.Light themes instead of AppCompat.Light, and there will be other changes as well.
STEP 2. In your manifest file, you must add:
android:theme="#style/DefaultActionBarTheme"
to every <activity declaration if that Activity has the ActionBar.
Try this. It will work.
Zygotelnit answer works but you have to omit the ["tools:targetApi="11"] from item declaration otherwise it will give you an error for some reason.
On the other hand, I've found a much shorter and easier but not so optimized solution.While searching through the actionBar class and playing around here is the answer:
In your activity.java, go down to
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
Anywhere appropriate in that method, write the following code:
ActionBar actionBar = getSupportActionBar();
actionBar.setBackgroundDrawable(new
ColorDrawable(Color.parseColor("#D62D20")));
You replace the color code by any color code of your choosing. It's obviously a hex color code.
for the last few days I'm trying to implement custom theme, which is created by Action Bar Style Generator to my application. I'm able to use theme with some generic samples from SDK, but I'm not able to use it with my application which uses ActionBarSherlock.
My application with ActionBarSherlock is a modified sample of Tabs and Pager.
Steps which I do:
Create theme with Android Action Bar Style Generator.
Copy theme to res folder inside my application.
Change theme in Manifest file.
After those steps only 'Action bar color' changes to correct one. All other styles are not used in application. I have tried many different approaches which I found online, but without success.
Thank you very much for your help.
Did you add the proper items to your App's theme in styles.xml? You need to use attributes that are NOT prefixed with android:, for example:
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
<item name="background">#drawable/bg_striped</item>
<item name="backgroundSplit">#drawable/bg_striped_split</item>
You would also keep the properly prefixed ones for Android versions that have native actionbar.
<item name="android:actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
<item name="android:background">#drawable/bg_striped</item>
<item name="android:backgroundSplit">#drawable/bg_striped_split</item>
The best place to understand this is to look at the demo provided with the ActionBarSherlock library project.
I managed to fix the problem.
I missed android:background attribute in TabWidget. This partially
solves the problem.
I had to set setLeftStripDrawable and setRightStripDrawable programatically.