We have just started Android Tablet development. I need to prototype for 7in and 10in tablets.
Is there any wireframe stencil i can get hold of ?
What are the dimensions of the canvas i need to start designing on ?
Just like phones, tablets have all sorts of dimensions and sizes.
Here is a quick list of different models with their respective sizes and dimensions:
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 3G - 10.1 inches, 1280 x 800 pixels
Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab - 7.0 inches, 600 x 1024 pixels
Dell Streak 7 - 7-inch 800×480
Motorola Xoom - 10.1-inch, 1280×800
Viewsonic G - 10.1-inchs 1024×600
These are the dimensions you'll find most often.
Rather than considering actual pixel dimensions (which can vary in size depending on pixel density), it might be easier to think in density independent pixels (dp). This is the smallest device width as given in the configuration examples from the docs:
7” tablet: 600dp
10” tablet: 720dp
Notes
For actual pixels size, multiply by 1 to get mdpi, multiple by 2 to get xhdpi, by 3 to get xxhdpi, etc. See here for more.
To provide different resources for the various screen sizes, see this answer.
Old topic but i think i've got a good way to resolve your probleme. If it can help some..
First of all, if you do right, All your activities should be composed ONLY with fragments.
You may know that when a screenSize is defined as exemple by 384* 640, that means your maxWidth is 384dp and your maxHeight is 640dp.
And so, it's easy to determine how height you should use without trying on emulator.
Still using my screenSize exemple : 384 (Widht) * 640 (Height) :
640dp
292dp
264dp '
<dimen name="max_height">640dp</dimen> <!-- screen maxHeight -->
<dimen name="half_height">292dp</dimen> <!-- ScreenMaxHeight with actionBar -->
<dimen name="half_height_bigactionbar">264dp</dimen> <!-- height without actionBar and its subActionBar -->
Down here, this is my fragment size :
<fragment
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="#dimen/half_height_bigactionbar"
Both of my fragmennts should now fill all the sreen
My action bar height is 56dp . If you do the map if i want he half of my screen i do ((maxScreenHeight) - (ToolBarSize) ) / 2.
I got ((640) - (56)) / 2 = 292dp !
Do the same for All of resolution you might know with all the window part you may use:
And you will have THE perfect match in every phone you know.
You can do the same math for width if you use tablet.
But remember, use as much as possible wrap_content + marginLeft and MarginRight to place your components !
When you wana create an activity. Draw it in a sheetwith small-paned . And think only with percent. Then do the math, and use ONLY fragments.
You should be fine then :). Ask if i wasn't clear enought !
Related
My company has a Android app. Our clients view the app with a Lenovo Tab M8. I am a designer tasked with recreating the current app experience in Figma so that our design team can have a design system and make accurate mockups. But I'm struggling to capture basic measurements (my experience is in Web and not Native apps).
The first question is, what is the width and length of the screen in pixels? I'm trying to create a basic screen template in Figma. I know the Lenovo display is 1280x800px with 16:10 screen ratio. But when I create a 1280x800 frame in Figma it's significantly larger than the physical device. I'm a little lost.
The other question is, I'm trying to recreate font sizes but I know the app uses dp and not px. I found a site that convert them, but I don't know if the tablet is LDPI, MDPI, or whatever.
https://www.pixplicity.com/dp-px-converter
Thanks for any insights you have.
You shouldn't need to know what density the tablet is, the point of using dp (density-independent pixels) is that everything will look pretty much the same size in the real world. The baseline density is LDPI, which is 160 pixels per inch - so 160dp is one inch on the screen.
XHDPI is 320 pixels per inch, so double the density - but converting 160dp to pixels on XHDPI devices involves multiplying it by 2, so the result is 320 pixels - which again corresponds to 1 inch on a 320dpi screen. See how it works?
So the pixel resolution isn't important, a tablet will be large in dp terms because they're physically bigger than a phone, more inches and all that. But if you're curious, if your M8 is the 2nd-gen one, according to the tech specs it's 4.8" on the 800 px axis (the one with the smallest bezels), and that works out to 166.7 DPI without taking those bezels into account - so it's an LDPI device!
I don't know anything about Figma, but so long as you're using dp measurements it should work ok? You have to be aware of the size of your screen though - when you said you created a frame 800 high and it was too big, if that was 800dp then 800 / 160 is 5" and your screen is only 4.8" high. Ideally your layout shouldn't require a specific physical size though, it should be able to adjust since different devices (even very similar ones) are different sizes - but I don't know how Figma works with that! That's just the way it works for the standard Android stuff
Also ideally fonts should use sp which is like dp but it has an additional scaling step depending on the user's font size settings on the device - it lets them shrink or enlarge text to their preference and for accessibility (the latter is especially important). Sometimes you want a fixed size for something that's more of a graphic element, but generally text should be scalable
If you want to know how to convert, have a look at the Material Type System - there's a chart there for converting between different units (also 1sp = 1dp for the Normal text size FYI). There's also a tool on there to create a type scale but only for stuff on Google Fonts - just saves you doing it yourself!
I have one problem with UI widget sizing, see 2 devices below as an example,
1.) Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7"
- Pixels : 1024x600 (mdpi)
- DPI : 160
- Density : 1.0
2.) Samsung Nexus 10 2013
- Pixels : 2560x1600 (xhdpi)
- DPI : 320
- Density : 2.0
If I place a widget with 50dp, by using px = dp (DPI / 160), it would be 50px for Tab 7" and 100px for Nexus 10. But in term of percentage, 50px is equal to 4.88% of screen width on Tab 7" while 100px is 3.9% of screen width on Nexus 10.
But, I need this widget to appear with same width percentage. So, I came up with 2 options.
A. Calculate at run time by getting the physical pixels and apply percentage, then resize the widget.
B. Calculate size and place in < dimen > in different xml file (sw600dp and sw700dp for my case).
As of now, I'm using option A to calculate size and set at runtime. It works well but I'm afraid that the calculation could affect the performance. If I choose option B, I will need to calculate size for every widget in every screen (50dp for Tab 7" and 62.5dp for Nexus 10 will result as 4.8% on both). But, if I want to change this value later or some manufacturer introduce new device with difference DPI or pixels (imagine, 7" tablet with hdpi resolution, 1.5 density, 240 DPI), I will have to redo all the calculation and update or provide new xml again.
So, my question is, is there an option C which will not slow down the performance and not taking a lot of manual calculation into account in future?
P.S. Sorry, I forgot to mentioned that I also using weight approach with my static widgets already, but my question is about dynamic-generate widget. For example,
a gridlayout that showing 5 columns on Landscape Tablet
a scrollview to show 4 rows per page on Phone
an ImageView with 5% padding
an ImageView with an aspect ratio on every device.
dp are almost equal on all devices in size, not in screen %
If you need same screen % then just get display size & calculate desired % of it. Then dynamically apply to your widget
Today, I read the android tutorial about supporting multiple screen. I got some problems here. In the tutorial, it says we can use size and density-specific resource in this way:
res/layout-w600dp/main_activity.xml
I know that w600dp means the available width is 600dp. But is it for portal or landscape?
Here is real case:
I want to design a full width header image for my android app in portal mode. This app is targeted for Samsung Galaxy S4, which has 5.0 inches, 1080x1920 pixels with 441 dpi. That means my header image need to be 1080 pixels. As android tutorial mentioned, in android, px = dp * (dpi/160); In Samsung Galaxy S4 example, 1080px width is 391dp. So do I need to declare the layout in:
res/layout-w391dp/main_activity.xml
or
res/layout-w320dp/main_activity.xml
When I am using Photoshop to create my header image, do I need to set my image parameter as 1080 width, 40 height and 441dpi? After I get the image, do I need to put this image in:
res/drawable-xhdpi/
or
res/drawable-w600dp/
The available width value will change when the orientation changes between landscape and portrait to match the current actual width.
If you want provide different layouts/resources for landscape and portrait add the qualifier name -land or -port respectively. See more at Android documentation
If you want fill all the available width don't think about dpi. If device width is 1080px then you need an image with 1080px. However, if you want an image look the same at diferent devices with diferent density then calculate its dimensions by applying these factors:
ldpi = 0.75
mdpi = 1
hdpi = 1.5
xhdpi = 2
xxhdpi = 3
It is not possible here to do a full explanation on this subject, and my English is not enough for such.
I have a 800 x 480 (landscape) design made in photoshop and now I'm trying to implement the same design on Android.
How am I supposed to calculate width and height for a LinearLayout? For example, a header has 800px width and 60px height. How many DPI they are?
The min and the target SDK are 14. Am I need to worry for devices that are using a smaller display? (Smaller than 480x800) ? (I don't know if older devices can run Android 4+)
I have tested on my AVD (Nexus 7) and this is how it's look (accordingly to my photoshop design):
But on a tablet:
Am I need to create different layouts for different devices?
First thing that you need to understand - for which density your design is. Most common situation is design in mdpi, which means that 1dp on device (with mdpi screen) will be equivalent to 1px of design layout. On devices with higher density it will be increased accordingly (4:6:8 rule).
Second thing - providing values in dp won't magically scale up your layout for larger devices. Note, that dpi is not the same as screen resolution. So, for example, large 10inch tablet with 1280x800 screen resolution is mdpi device (not hdpi, not xhdpi).
Third. It makes no sense to say "800x600 device is smaller that 1280x800", because they may both be, for example, 4inch phone.
Fourth. Screen resolution have nothing to do with SDK version.
What you need to do, is look for another design for larger devices or ask designer about what he wanted to see. Maybe images shouldn't be strictly sized in dp, maybe they should be sized in percentage of the occupied screen?
One would say that if the Galaxy Tab screen resolution (in portrait mode) is 600px and the screen width is 3.55inch, the screen density would be 600/3.55 = 169 dpi. Knowing that and keeping in mind the way the device independent pixels (dp) is computed (http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html):
px = dp * (dpi / 160);
600 = dp * (169 / 160);
dip = 568
So drawing a horizontal line of 568dp (device independent pixels) width starting at position 0 must exactly match the width of the screen. But if you try this on device you will find that the screen width is 400dp. I will use the same formula again but for getting dpi:
600 = 400 * (dpi / 160);
dpi = 240
So having the 240dpi, 3.55inch screen width and 600pixels, does it mean that one physical pixel is composed of more ‘dots’ otherwise the parameters corresponds to the width of 852pixel (3.55*240).
I thought that dpi means dots per inch, which is pixels per inch. But this seems to not be true...
Added later:
This (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/more-resources.html#Dimension) says:
160dp is always one inch regardless of the screen density
Which is not true. Just check the measurement source from this:
Difference between android dimension: pt and dp
Added even later:
The reason I am asking is that violating the rule that 160dp = 1inch leads to the fact that when specifying the control width to e.g. 320dp it will cover on Galaxy Tab much bigger portion that that really necessary and much bigger then what you would expect from 600x1024px screen...
Thanks for clarification
BR
STeN
Galaxy Tab (7") doesn't report its real density. To understand this issue, read the following article:
http://realmike.org/blog/2010/12/21/multiple-screen-sizes-with-processing-for-android/
Apparently, that’s also what Samsung found when they made the Galaxy
Tab. The Galaxy Tab has a 7″, 1024×600 screen with 170 dpi. Yet, the
Tab does not report its density as “mdpi” but as “hdpi”, so the layout
looks exactly as in the second screenshot. If they used “mdpi”, the
icons would be .28″ wide, with “hdpi”, they are .42″ wide—not a big
deal, and I must admit, the layout does look prettier this way.
The article contains some images that will make you understand the problem.