I'm looking for a good 3D rendering and animation engine for Android, what can be migrated into the new 3.x Fragments views - as I want it to be a simple View, not a whole-UI screen. What engine can do this easily? My needed features would be simple animations (rotation), lighting, material change.
Unfortunately, it's hard to say what will be future proof in terms supporting upcoming features such as 3.x Fragment Views. But that being said, we've been taking a look recently at RightWare Kanzi for a different approach for handling our rendering and animation on Android. Take a look at their website and product sheets for their product offering that consists of Kanzi, Kanzi Studio and the Kanzi Engine. At the very least, I know they can accommodate rotation, lighting and material changes.
I would suggest jMonkey, a big advantage is that you can run it on Desktop+Android, so development is more comfortable
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I'm porting a vector graphics editor from iOS to Android. The app must draw a complex hierarchy of graphical objects in an efficient manner, so that the graphics can be edited with gestures in real time. The edited work commonly consists of images, text and graphical primitives (lines, circles etc.). UI elements like selection highlights are rendered on a separate layer on the top.
On the iOS app, if one component of the graphic changes (for example a small text element changes its content), only that text element is re-rendered.
On iOS, we use CALayer objects from the CoreAnimation framework. This works very well. What framework can be used on Android for this use case? Is there an established "native" way to do that, or are usually third party frameworks used?
Android does not have similar thing out of the box. We do have core.animation but it is limited to simple behavioral animations. To create what you want you need to use SurfaceView or GLSurfaceView and help of clean OpenGL. You may also try to use ordinary Canvas of View - you will have limited possibilities though.
Also there are wrapper around OpenGl and SurfaceView like libgdx it is used mostly for games though - so it has much wider possibilities than you need, but it is less complicated than OpenGl.
Hope it helps.
I would like to create a UI similar to the one that Apple created for their Music app. I am specifically talking about rounded shaped items that you can scroll to explore different types of songs.
There is a video here that will help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr2dn6IAVzU
Apple has a very strong graphic API that makes this UI really easy to code. For instance you can use physics, etc
I am very new with Android. Does Canvas allows me to do the same thing ? do you have any recommendations ?
No, there's no UI tools like that, and definitely no built in physics engine like that on Android. You can probably find libraries, but it will all be custom code. And I wouldn't recommend Canvas for it, I'd go for OpenGL.
As an aside- that is the ugliest, most annoying UI I've seen in my life. I wouldn't use it if you paid me to. UI elements shouldn't bounce around and move, it provides no benefit and makes the app harder to use. Can you imagine using that if you had reduced vision, or motor control issues? Whoever made that should be fired. Its a great argument for making software be forced to comply to the ADA.
A newbie question.
I am a newcomer to Java/Android (even UI development) .
My test apps look a little drab even though they do what the intend to do (with respect to app functionality).
Apart from Java, what are other technology needed for graphic rich app (oval 3d buttons etc).
PS: I did a lil research on this before coming here and found most of the questions were asked with respect to game development.But I am not interested in game development though.
In my history of making nice looking apps it usually all comes down to positioning the buttons and other things nicely and making custom images for buttons. If you want to simplify some things try using LIBGDX's UI tools. They allow a somewhat simplified way to load in custom images and scale/position them according to screen size.
I am looking for the best way to develop an Android app that has one component that allows the user to draw shapes, rotate them, scale them, slice them etc. (I am calling this component ActivityArea). In addition to this ActivityArea there need to be regular buttons, textViews, editViews etc. on the app.
I have explored 2 options - using libgdx and building a custom view. Both approaches appear doable. However, with libgdx, as far as I understand, all the buttons, textViews etc will also have to be created using the libgdx libraries. With this regard I have the following questions:
Is my understanding that libgdx will necessarily have to be used to render buttons and other regular android views?
Is there any way of including a libgdx powered view within an android layout?
Are there other libraries/options available that can be used to get geometric functions within an Android app?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
You can use Android UI atop LibGDX if you like. Typically for this you'd use the AndroidApplication.initializeForView(...) method to create the libgdx view and inject it into your layout.
As far as other libraries, if you doing 2d shapes and don't have to have a consistent 60fps, I'd probably just use Android's Canvas.
my next project will be to develop a little game for android. In fact it will be more based on textual in- and outputs, so i don't need best hd graphics but nice looking "standard widgets".
I will mainly need Buttons, Checkboxes, RadioButtons, TextFields, SpinEdits so in general only the standard textual widgets. As i don't like the included ones in Android ("no looking cool enough", customization difficult, ..) i'm searching for alternative widgets or an possiblity to draw to them easily for example with an 2D framework. Themes are welcome.
Any hints?
you can use canvas, opengl or games engine, for example http://www.andengine.org/