In my app I have something similar in appearance to labels in GMail app UI. For those who may not know, they look like this (labels are these colorful bars):
In order to achieve similar effect I use nine-patch drawables - for each label I am creating a TextView and assign drawable to it. This is simple solution, but I don't like it. It's not elegant, it is quite slow as shown by profiler, and I just don't think it's the right way to do it.
I changed the design of the UI to make it more "ICS-y", so I removed rounded corners from the labels. And I started thinking how I could replace 9-patch solution. The most obvious thing is to use BackgroundColorSpan. But it has one, small drawback. I want my labels to have some padding. With drawables, it was easy to achieve. With spans, it's harder. To make horizontal padding, I can just add spaces at the beginning and at the end of the string. But how to make vertical padding larger? To clear things up, this is a screenshot of the label with BackgroundColorSpan:
I want to make the colored parts above and below the text larger. I think I should use some kind of MetricAffectingSpan, but I couldn't figure out which one. Or maybe I should write my own? Or, finally, maybe spans are just not able to fulfill my needs and I should stay with images or create a canvas and "manually" draw everything as in GMail app?
The easiest way to do this, and im pretty sure the GMAIL app is making use of it, are shapes.
Just create a custom shape, in your case a rectangle shape with rounded corners and a solid color, and assign this drawable then to the background property of your textview.
A shape is defined in xml.
You will assign it as follows:
<TextView
...
android:background="#drawable/my_awesome_shape" />
Related
There is the concept of rounded corners for views and drawables in Android, however, am working on an interface for a kids robot, and someone asked for curly borders - sort of like wavy (sine wave kind of thing). Now, how the heck can one achieve such a thing in either XML or Java - especially, without resorting to use of image overlays or backgrounds?
rounded corners aren't in fact rounded Views, its just a bit of transparency in corners. you can create some custom drawables/Bitmaps and set for your Views (as a background or use ImageView) or you can use custom programmatic drawing like HERE
Have tried to use images of that form and use them as background in a transparent container?
I try to create a custom button where a circular shape is cut out from a rectangular button, see mockup.
I already looked into the Outline class but it doesn't provide subtraction, only rects and ovals, no combination of them.
Also, I thought of setting android:background to a custom drawable but I couldn't succeed. The drawable consisted of a layer-list with a colored rect and a white oval but the oval was always placed at a different position depending on the device's resolution.
Do I really have to go through the pain of creating my own View class? That seems to be an overkill for this rather simple task, doesn't it?
PS: Concerning usability, I know that buttons close to each other aren't user-friendly, but this problem doesn't arise in my real scenario, only in this mockup.
I am having trying to accomplish this kind of a design. It needs to stretch to accomodate difference screens but rather then stretching it should repeat the pattern, I think the picture is pretty self-explanatory. 9patch only wont cut it as it only stretches.
Thanks for your time
The simplest method to do what you want would be to use a shape drawable with the stroke element set on it to obtain that dash pattern.
You may be able to also do it with a layer-list drawable.
Hello fellow Android designers,
I am struggling right now to create xml tooltip that would look like the one on this picture:
Unfortunately it seems like a hell of a work. Till now I was only able to create a simple rounded rectangle like that:
Is it actually possible to create such a shape I have presented on the first photo using xml styling or should I try to create it programatically (which will probably take huge amount of time and creating border would be really hard)? Or maybe the simplest solution is the best and I should use partially transparent png image with the shape of my choosing?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
You can draw it using stretchable 9-patch drawable.
You can specify there which parts are fixed (the little knob on the left and corners) and which are stretchable (all other parts)
I'm looking for to create something like this: http://imm.io/Bcco
The outer glow + the white space around the image. I've already seen How to make glow effect around a bitmap?. But there was no conclusive answer provided there.
I'm willing to consider a hackish solution if that's the only option.
Make a 9-patch png that is a box with an outer shadow around it with the content marks (right and bottom) be inside the white part. Then set that to the background of whatever element you want to add the shadow to. Here is one that I made just now that you can use or will give you and idea of what to do.
If you are unfamiliar with 9-patch images read about them here
Note: You'll need to save it as something.9.png
you can drop it into draw9patch and adjust the sides if you need more or less whitespace.