Develop Reference

Android nested layout

I am developing my first Android app. Although I have 15 years of Java software development experience, Android is new to me. My desired look is a background image with other images on top of it, as well as labels and phone numbers. It seems like the best way to accomplish this is a Linear Layout for the background image, with a nested layout for the other fields on top of that. I have searched online and cannot find any sample code on how to accomplish this. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

What are you using to develop? If you are you using Eclipse with the Android SDK this is super easy. Put the desired picture in the appropriate drawable folder, go to the graphical view of layout that corresponds to your activity, on the right side of the screen there is a list of all the properties, find background, then select your picture from drawables. You can also do this from the xml using android:background="#drawable/yourPic". This way you don't have to worry about having things layered on top of it.

I think you should go through followings:
1. http://phandroid.com/2011/05/11/10-tips-for-android-ui-design/
2. http://mobile.tutsplus.com/series/android-user-interface-design/
3. http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/30/designing-for-android/
4. http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2011/09/thinking-like-web-designer.html

If I got, something like this can work:
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
<stuff>
<RelativeLayout
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
<stuff>
</RelativeLayout>
<stuff>
</RelativeLayout>
I used it in an app, and made the trick.

First of all, RelativeLayout is the best layout to use. It depends on your design.
If your design says to keep all the views either vertically OR horizontally, you can use LinearLayouts in between.
My suggested way:
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent" >
<LinearLayout android:id="#+id/layout1"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_parent"
android:orientation="Horizontal">
<View1 />
<View2 />
</LinearLayout>
</LinearLayout android:id="#+id/layout2"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_parent"
android:orientation="Vertical"
android:layout_below="#id/layout1">
<View3 />
<View4 />
</LinearLayout>
</RelativeLayout>
Which will yield you something like this

Android 4.0 Tabbed Activity Layout

I have 2-3 Activities in my app that all share data in a memory pool. I want to be able to easily switch between these activities while keeping them all simultaneously running. In addition, I am developing for Android 4.0. I would like to use TabActivity, but it has been deprecated and replaced with ActionBar, which I have tried but I don't think it's what I'm looking for. I want large tabs, similar to the classic "Artist/Playlist/All" tabs found in the stock Android Music Application, or like the Tab Bar seen at the bottom of the screenshot below. Does anyone know of a library to create these tabs or a way to make ActionBar more customizable? Or is using TabActivity a perfectly good solution, even on ICS devices?

ActionBar is what you're looking for, actually.
You should convert your Activites to Fragments. Assuming they're not too complex, this shouldn't be hard at all. There are tons of examples out there. You need one Activity, preferably a FragmentActivity, to hold all of them.
This should help:
http://arvid-g.de/12/android-4-actionbar-with-tabs-example

There are several subquestions to this, I'll try to address them all:
-In order to use the top tabs, you want to use an ActionBar.
-If you were to do it in the style of the music app, where you swipe sideways between views and the label of the current one is always front and center... For that, the class you'd want to use is called ViewPager
You can see all of these methods by creating a new Activity in eclipse, and going through the wizard. Under "Navigation Type" you can select "Tabs", "Tabs + Swipe", "Swipe Views + Title Strip". Create any one of those Activities to see how it looks, and then look at the code to see how it's implemented & how to customize it.
-Navigation along the bottom is discouraged- See the Android Design Guide, spec the section "Don't use Bottom Tab Bars"

You have probably found an answer by now, but I thought I'll share another way you could create something like that tab bar using images and xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:id="#+id/main">
<LinearLayout
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="horizontal"
android:background="#drawable/tabackground"
android:layout_alignParentBottom="true"
android:id="#+id/llBottom">
<ImageButton
android:src="#drawable/icon2"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:background="#00000000"
/>
<ImageButton
android:src="#drawable/icon3"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:background="#00000000"
/>
<ImageButton
android:src="#drawable/icon4"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:background="#00000000"
/>
<ImageButton
android:src="#drawable/icon5"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:background="#00000000"
/>
</LinearLayout>
<ImageView
android:layout_height="24dp"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_alignTop="#+id/llBottom"
android:background="#10ffffff"/>
<ImageView
android:layout_height="1dp"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_alignTop="#+id/llBottom"
android:background="#30ffffff"/>
</RelativeLayout>
Is not perfect but with some creativity and changing some values it can look very good.
Hope it helps in some way.

Slide Toggle for Android

Anyone know of any open source implementation of a slide toggle for android. The default android toggle(ToggleButton) is not pretty. I am looking for anything similar to iOS. I should be able to implement one from scratch. But if anything similar is already available, then i can build on it.
Thanks in advance to the wonderful stackoverflow community.
Edit1:
What I meant by iOS Slide Toggle is UISwitch
Edit2: Just want to summarize the answer. Commonsware provided the clue. I ended up back porting the Switch code from 4.0 to2.2.2. Thanks to the open-sourced code, back porting was not very difficult. The code is hosted on git hub. http://github.com/pellucide/Android-Switch-Demo-pre-4.0/tree/master/
A screenshot from that project

you can use the sliding drawer widget in android to have a sliding toggle switch. you just have to "slice" the ios toggle images into3 parts, one for the handle, one for the sliding drawer background and one for the content part. then put an image on top of it like a frame to give you the "round edges"
here's what i've come up with:
XML Layout
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:orientation="vertical" >
<FrameLayout
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal"
android:layout_marginTop="100dp" >
<SlidingDrawer
android:id="#+id/slidingDrawer1"
android:layout_width="154dp"
android:layout_height="54dp"
android:background="#drawable/ios_retina_toggle_on_full"
android:content="#+id/content"
android:handle="#+id/handle"
android:orientation="horizontal" >
<ImageButton
android:id="#+id/handle"
android:layout_width="54dp"
android:layout_height="54dp"
android:background="#00000000"
android:src="#drawable/ios_retina_toggle_button" />
<ImageView
android:id="#+id/content"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:src="#drawable/ios_retina_toggle_off" />
</SlidingDrawer>
<ImageView
android:id="#+id/imageView2"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:src="#drawable/ios_retina_toggle_frame" />
</FrameLayout>
</LinearLayout>
ios_retina_toggle_on_full
ios_retina_toggle_button
ios_retina_toggle_off
ios_retina_toggle_frame
and finally a screenshot of how it looked on the emulator on a 3.7 WVGA screen running gingerbread:

iOS does not seem to have a "slide toggle", at least under that name, based on a Google search. And, you did not provide an image (or a link to an image) of what you want.
Android 4.0 added a Switch that you might be able to backport to earlier versions. You will see samples of it in the API Demos app on your emulator:

You can try using ToggleButton specifying your own drawables for its states.

We can try using seekbar with custom drawables and thumb, setting the max value to 1 and min to 0. we can add animations for sliding effect

layer application in android

I am a new one in Android so please sorry for stupidity.
Well my problem is in multiple layers -
I would like to combine two transparent ImageViews one above the other. This is similar to photoshops layers, what is the sample layers activity in android?

You can use a RelativeLayout for this.
The property android:layout_centerInParent If true, centers the child horizontally and vertically within its parent. [boolean]
Similarly there are properties like ,
android:layout_alignParentLeft,
android:layout_alignParentRight,
android:layout_alignParentTop,
android:layout_alignParentBottom.
Try these.

Already answered Overlapping Views in Android ? That should be all you need, using RelativeLayout:
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:id="#+id/layout"
>
<ImageView android:id="#+id/imageview1"
android:background="#00000000"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:src="#drawable/image1"
/>
<ImageView android:id="#+id/imageview2"
android:background="#00000000"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:src="#drawable/image2"
/>
</RelativeLayout>
would be an example code for you.

you can use the layer-list， for a full investigation, please refer to http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/drawable-resource.html#LayerList

Well its quite possible to do in android, but the thing is what actually you are going to do with that. you can give the same positions for both the images in layout now both will be overlapped and based on your condition or situation you can show and hide one another programatically. In the same way you can give multiple images overlapped on one another. Hope this will help you out to understand :)

Anyone know what this error mean for android tabs?

I am trying to try out the tutorial online and wanted to put the tab to the layout xml. I have change the extends from Activity to TabActivity. In the design view of the layout xml, I have the below.
Error during post inflation process:
TabHost requires a TabWidget with id "android:id/tabs".
View found with id 'tabs' is 'com.android.layoutlib.bridge.MockView'
The following classes could not be found:
I have looked for solution but none of them fixed except I found one in different language. I tried using the translator on google but not so helpful.
Does anyone manage to get the tabs function.
I am using Android 2.2 Api and develop with an eclipse IDE

Known bug http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=13092
A user suggested to switch build target to 1.6 and the issue goes away. Obviously a temporary fix.

You need a layout like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TabHost xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:id="#android:id/tabhost"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent">
<LinearLayout
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:padding="5dp">
<TabWidget
android:id="#android:id/tabs"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content" />
<FrameLayout
android:id="#android:id/tabcontent"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:padding="5dp" />
</LinearLayout>
</TabHost>
See the Tab Layout tutorial for more info.

Do you have a TabWidget with id android:id/tabs as the error message tells you you need?

Switch to android Target 3.0 or 3.1. You can find that drop down list on the top right side

I had the same issue. The workaround is detailed in this link:
Comment 63 by blundell...#gmail.com, May 5, 2011
As stated above Quick Fix: Just change the API Target (top left of XML
graphical view) to 3.0 and you can see it