Is there a way to scale buttons in such a way that the do not loose their 3D effect. Since everything is beeing scaled proportionally the 3D border of a button becomes too large when the button scale changes.
On iPhone there is an attribute that can be set so that this does not happen and the button looks good in whatever size.
Is there anything like this on Android?
Or how would one setup a button so that scaling looks good all the time?
Many thanks!
You could make 9-patch button backgrounds using draw-9 patch in the Android SDK bin folder. These will scale very nicely from a very small sample/drawable.
Related
I have a JPEG photo which I want to use to as a background for one of the screens.
I want the behaviour to be simlar to the css backgroundSize: cover property. (Play with the following tool to see what I mean: https://davidwalsh.name/demo/background-size.html)
For iPhone, this issue is fairly easy, as you can literally have several different versions of the same image depending which iPhone the app is being installed on.
For Android, this is much more difficult as they have various different aspect ratios and resolutions.
Therefore my question is, how can I specify an image that covers the entire screen.
You can always fake this by adding the imageview inside a View and calculate the proper height/width you need to cover the screen (get the shortest side and scale it up and multiply the other side by the original ratio).
You could also use https://github.com/AndreaVitale/imageview that supports a cover mode
For Android, My suggestion is to use 9-patch Image instead of normal image. It will stretch it self to entire Screen, if you placed image as background
of Window it self as well as worked for ImageView perfectly.
Thank you.
I am learning about Android UI and am unclear why people use nine-patch, when you could use vector graphics, because those are scalable without any pixel degradation. I am a beginner in Android, so I hope I am not missing anything here, but it seems like it would be easier to build vector graphics and use those. You would not need the special editor to build them.
Can anyone explain the advantages to using nine-patch over vector? (Don't just explain advantages of nine-patch, as that is already done on StackO., but rather the advantages that vector does not have). Because it seems like Android recommends nine-patch. Thanks.
In vector graphics all side are scale or stretch when we set it to any background whereas in 9-patch we can define which sides can scale or strech so at runtime only those side scale which we set it to scale in 9-patch tool.
from this
-> The advantage of using 9-patch images is that when using it as a background, for instance, the image won't stretch and loose proportions in different screen sizes. the center 'patch' will remain as is and the 'borders' patches will be stretched to fit the screen/view size.
let say you have this image.
and a button with fill parent width. if you set this image to button background it will scale completely and your image gets blur (mean t will expand to button width)and it will not look good. so what 9 - path tool do that you define that online scale some part of image let say if width is fill parent. dont scale whole image . let say we set that after t (in image). scale whole area, so t will not get blur. so this will make good your button.hope you got my point..:)
after making your image 9 patch and setting to button background. your button look like this.
instead of t(in image). whole area expand and fill the buttons width.
Imagine a button with rounded corners. How do you scale it? If you scale it only horizontally, you will have elliptic corners, which would be ugly.
This is what 9-patch is for.
i hate 9patches. i am quite attentive when doing my artwork. i don't even use photoshop. i go with illustrator.
i do everything right when exporting my artwork, i used to do my 9 patches with insane zoom on, maybe check afther that in photoshop for misplaced pixels...
** sad trumpet ** when put on a view, if i used some subtle round corners like 6px or 10px and a stroke everything looks awful at mdpi.
So I solved my problems by marrying the two. I wrote my own 9patch which uses vectors. :)
Everything looks like it's been touched by baby Jesus. Perfect corners, strokes and, best of all, you can use one asset for all the screen sizes, densities while, of course, no more transparent borders, wicked errors because 9patch won't stretch inward, so on and so forth.
I use vectors for icons too. While there sometimes are issues with various effects, these are minimal and easily avoided if you do some reading on how to avoid them.
Best of luck to all you guys!
This is a very basic example.
You can do whatever strikes your fancy. Because of the performance impact of svg's on an app, when first run [or when the user changes appearance options, i like to save the newly generated bitmaps as pngs, if possible.
You don't get any more "best of both worlds" than this.
You can define content are on a 9-patch image which means (for example) text will always be placed in that specific area, I think you cannot do this in Vector image. Android has built-in support for 9-path but for vectors you have to use a library.
9-patch rendering is easy to implement and efficient. If you have an image that can be scaled by stretching horizontal or vertical lines (e.g. buttons or rectangular icons), then use a 9-patch. If you have some icons that don't scale well, then create multiple versions at different resolutions and use Android's resource management to handle it. Both of these approaches are much easier and more efficient than vector graphics.
If you have large images or scenes to render, and you don't want to take up a ton of space with bitmaps, thats when you start thinking about vector graphics.
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 have quite a few buttons in my application, they vary in sizes based on the text inside. I want to customize the buttons but I am not sure if I should use
A) Ninepatch pngs
B) Android xml created
C) Photoshop pngs
I want the buttons to scale nicely and therefore not look distorted based on screen size. What are the positives and negatives of the above methods? Is there an ideal way to go about this?
It depends on what they should look like. Rounded corners? Complicated images? Drop shadows? Plain colors?
If you want simple buttons that are monotone in color, xml drawables are the best solution. You can do rounded corners through xml, so if plain is what you are looking for this is the best option.
If you are working with an image, then a 9 patch is the way to go. Play around with the draw9patch tool that comes with the sdk to get the hang of it. You also don't necessarily only need to leave the corners in tack, sometimes you may want to break up the resizable area depending on the image.
PNGs are the last resort as they are the least flexible of the 3 options.
By the way, you should also consider using a state list for all of your buttons, regardless of how you implement the drawable that the button uses. See the link below:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/drawable-resource.html#StateList
Looking for advice with the next problem. I am developing small game and I have a *.png file for background. I need to put it to background of the main game screen. Moreover, it has to bee 2 times bigger in width and 1.5 times bigger in height as the screen's sizes, because my objects "flight" across these borders. Additionally the screen is moving around this background in a gameplay. But I have stuck a bit on how to do it.
I want my background to look similar on all screens with different sizes and densities. I have tried some solutions but I don't like them, or I have made something wrong:
Make different background images and put them in special folders. It sounds good, but with the amount of resolutions of Android devices in the market it is not sounds good for me. It will just make the size of *.apk bigger. And if I will use the methods to set background it will stretch the image - not a good idea I think.
In the onDraw() method draw the image on canvas. I have to put it's top-left corner to the most top-left corner of the possible game area and draw it. But, here is some options:
cut from the main image the image i want and draw only this piece (what I use now)
resize the image I have and draw with this changes
something else...
So, the question is: what is the best option for drawing background for the game screen when you need it to be almost twice bigger than the screen's size, make it looks same on all devices and move the screen around when the game is played?
you should use 9 patch image .
A NinePatchDrawable graphic is a stretchable bitmap image, which Android will automatically resize to accommodate the contents of the View in which you have placed it as the background.
see this link.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/2d-graphics.html#nine-patch