Develop Reference

Android Button with border and background color

I am trying to beautify some of the UI components in Android. I need to create a button with black border and background color. Everything is fine if I hardcode the variables into XML. But i have different buttons with different background color and different border color and size and etc. all the variations you could say. And it is surely wrong if I go and create all the variations in separate XML files. At the moment, I am creating styles in code but it looks a little inefficient.
gradient.setColor(getContext().getResources().getColor(R.color.ORANGE));
gradient.setCornerRadius(5);
gradient.setStroke(5, 0xFF000000);
button.setBackground(gradient);
And if I want to have button with different background color, I need to create another gradient and initialize it and set to button's resource. Another thing, when I am setting the background of the button, I am also losing the color change when the button is pressed. How do you create an XML drawable resource that can be customized in the interface? Or what is the easier way?
Thanks.

used this:-
Drawable mDrawable = ContextCompat.getDrawable(youContext, R.drawable.youdrawable)
mDrawable.setColorFilter(PorterDuffColorFilter(youColor, PorterDuff.Mode.MULTIPLY)
button.setbackground(mDrawable)

How to color a portion of a view in android?

Now I have this task where I should create a rating bar just like youtube in my app , and so my idea was to have a textview where I set its background to a color but then remove the color according to an equation I will make so it displays only a percentage of it... any idea how can I do this or where to look ?

The simplest way to do this would be to create a selector.xml. You would assign android:background="#drawable/selector". Your selector would decide which background color to show based on what percentage you have assigned.
This link explains how to use selectors with buttons. It should help to get you on the right track...http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/color-list-resource.html
EDIT: You can still accomplish a custom progress bar by xml. It is very similar to the selector. Just think of it as many more selectors based on progress instead of state. Here is a nice example...Custom Drawable for ProgressBar/ProgressDialog
You can also look into xml animations. They are similar.

Custom RadioButtons with different color

I am new to android and try to create a simple color picker.
The idea is to have a few filled circles showing a color and the selected one should have an circle around it.
That didn't sound too hard. I draw the circles with <shape>, create two resources, one with only a filled circle, one with the filled circle and an transparent circle with a solid stroke. Then I created a <selector> and set this as the background of my <RadioButton>.
This worked fine for one color, however now I'd like to have the same styles, but with a different color for each <RadioButton>.
The only solotution I could come up with is to create this triplet of xml-files for each color. This would certainly work, but it strikes me as extremely inelegant.
I tried to access the background of the buttons, but it seems I can only access the <selector>, not it's children.
I also tried to create a FrameLayout that would parent the RadioButton and an ImageView so the RadioButton only needs to display the border. This didn't fully work. I could select a RadioButton, but it wouldn't get deselected upon selecting another one.
I guess the best solution is to have a background that can change itself according to the state of the button, just like <selector> does, but with a more comprehensive way of determining which drawable to use, at least with access to the tag-Property of the RadioButton, but I cannot see how to do this.

check this github repo
https://github.com/VishalJogiya/CustomRadioAndShapes
xml layout code
<customradio.vj.com.library.CustomRadio
android:id="#+id/radio9"
android:layout_width="#dimen/thirty_two_dp"
android:layout_height="#dimen/thirty_two_dp"
android:layout_marginBottom="#dimen/eight_dp"
android:layout_marginLeft="#dimen/sixteen_dp"
android:layout_marginRight="#dimen/sixteen_dp"
android:layout_marginTop="#dimen/eight_dp"
custom:radioColor="#AA00FF"
custom:radioShape="simple_circle2" />

Wrap content inside box

How can I wrap the content inside a box? Just like twitter.
Check how is Twitter and how is mine:
http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/8241/stackoverflow.png

To get the effect your trying to go far, you're going to have to use a 9patch png as your background image for your ListView and set padding on your ListView to match the size of your border on your 9patch.
The 9patch should look exactly like the background as it shows in the Twitter example.
You can learn more about 9patches here.

It's an optical illusion. You really want to create three 9-patches - top item, middle item, bottom item. Then dynamically set the background drawable for each item based on its position in the list. Just make sure your borders line up properly between the drawables and you should be fine.

Android application - three questions

I am writing an Android application at the moment, no knowledge of java what so ever, except what I have learnt in the last 5 hours. I've managed to implement a two screens and a nice looking layout.
I have three questions:
How do I set the Action Bar on Honeycomb to be transparent like in the Google Maps application? I want to be able to partially see the background graphic through it.
What code to use to empty five edit texts and a textview on button click? I've read something about a viewgroup, but I have no idea how to implement that...
I have a linearlayout with a tablelayout centred horizontally and vertically inside it, and eleven table rows in that. How do I set a partially transparent black as a sort of fill colour for the tablelayout without ruining the background of the linearlayout? Every time I try to set a fill colour it blacks out the entire background image of the layout surrounding it as well.
Plain english would be preferable because I am so new to this.
Thanks heaps for any replys, have a great day.

For the first question, I think you can do like below:
In the onCreate() method, before the setConentView() add:
getWindow().requestFeature(Window.FEATURE_ACTION_BAR_OVERLAY);
The Android system will automatically set background fill the whole screen.
create a transparent sharp "mysharp.xml"like below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<shape>
<solid android:color="#55000000" />
</shape>
set the action background
getActionBar().setBackgroundDrawable(getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.mysharp));

you can also declare action bar overlay in xml by
<item name="android:windowActionBarOverlay">true</item>
just like here http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/HoneycombGallery/res/values/styles.html

Answer to your 1st question: You can implement a theme on the HoneyComb action bar. Check this link for more info. The color would be something like this: #29000000.
The first hex 2-digit(#29) represents alpha channels of color and set opacity. If value is “00” that means 100% transparent. if value is set it will be opaque, it can be any value in 00 to FF.
More links on styling the Action Bar:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/04/customizing-action-bar.html
Example project is to be found here:
http://p-xr.com/customizing-the-action-bar-in-honeycomb/

In my Android 3 application I used
// Makes Action Bar Transparent
requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_ACTION_BAR_OVERLAY);
actionBar = getActionBar();
actionBar.setBackgroundDrawable(null);
// END
and now the action bar is 100% transparent, Except for the stuff I add to it of course :)
Cheers