Wondering which gesture to use to be able to allow the user to touch the object with their finger, slide and release the object and allow the object to continue to move across the screen once they release the object. This would all be in Air for Android as well. I don't want to move the stage itself, just an object on the screen. Thanks for any help!
I am not quite sure if this is what you are looking for, but you should consider reading here. It starts like this:
With the Android drag/drop framework, you can allow your users to move
data from one View to another View in the current layout using a
graphical drag and drop gesture. The framework includes a drag event
class, drag listeners, and helper methods and classes.
Although the framework is primarily designed for data movement, you
can use it for other UI actions. For example, you could create an app
that mixes colors when the user drags a color icon over another icon.
The rest of this topic, however, describes the framework in terms of
data movement.
Your question leads me to believe that you need something like this to happen. Hope this helps and sorry if you are asking something different. Cheers
Related
I was recently using the app Secret and was observing the amazing user-interface that it has. If you are opening Secret's webpage, please scroll down a little to see the UI.
Being someone who is still a novice in Android and wants to learn, I would like to ask how that UI has been designed. I could ask a lot many questions in this one post but I will limit myself to just one for now.
Whenever you click on one of those tiles, it opens up and shows the comments for that particular tile. The other tiles below and above disappear. When you click on the tile again, it smoothly animates back to its position and the tiles above and below come into view. How is this achieved?
What have I tried so far? Nothing, because it is a "where do I begin?" question.
This is probably an instance of a custom activity transition (and a particularly well polished one).
In general, you can use the overridePendingTransition() to specify an animation that must be run when the current activity is changed (a classic example is sliding in a new Activity from a direction, while the previous Activity exits in the opposite direction). However, these transitions generally do not share UI elements.
Chet Haase has done a few DevBytes (in particular this one) to "simulate" an activity transition that shares an UI element (i.e. a view) between the caller and called activities. For example, if you have a Gallery, and you click on an image to show it full-screen, you would probably want the image to "grow" smoothly until it occupies this new position. The trick to achieve this is to actually disable the standard transitions entirely and include in the Intent used to start the activity the information about the current position and dimensions of the view that you want to "share":
Intent subActivity = new Intent(this, PictureDetailsActivity.class);
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".left", screenLocation[0]);
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".top", screenLocation[1]);
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".width", v.getWidth());
subActivity.putExtra(PACKAGE + ".height", v.getHeight());
startActivity(subActivity);
overridePendingTransition(0, 0);
Therefore, the new activity can extract this data, and with this information and the knowledge of where on the screen the view should end up, can build and execute an animation that simulates the desired effect.
This technique can be difficult to implement if you want a complex animation, so in Android L this was baked into the platform itself: Activity Transitions can handle this automatically and provide a few built-in animations to act on the remaining (i.e. non shared) views. For example, the explode transition seems to be very much like the one you describe.
Regarding layouts:
You might find it helpful to use hierarchy viewer, which offers a function to capture the layers of the UI and store them in a Photoshop file. This gives you a good idea how the layout of a particular app you are was created and what kind of views were used.
Regarding animations:
Checkout videos by Chet Haase and Romain Guy who discuss graphics and animations in detail.
You can start with the Android training guides.
This one is an overview of designing with media and animation, but this one uses a ViewPager to achieve the effect you want.
I am currently designing a Sudoku application for my own personal development, this is the first proper application I will be making. I can program in Java quite effectively with good object orientated understanding.
I want to create the application with 1 view as shown below:
As you can see I would like a single view with a grid object, the grid object will have it's own paint method.
How would I go about making this object zoomable?
How would I handle interaction with this object?
I also have 2 buttons on the bottom left and right,
How would I anchor these so they won't zoom?
Could I float these over the object and have the object as the entire view?
What pop up menu should I use? I would like a small menu with difficulty selection a restart button or a new puzzle button, also an exit button.
Thanks for reading this far, if you do have any advice for me at all then please post, If you require more information about anything then please ask!
You may find this Android Developers tutorial useful in achieving your zooming aims - https://developer.android.com/training/animation/zoom.html. It refers to an ImageView but with some changes I believe it could work similarly with your subclass of GridView.
You wouldn't have to worry about the buttons as long as the zoom was applied only to the GridView. However, you may wish to consider using an Action Bar instead of your current buttons for the menu and hint button.
I have done live user testing for a list in my app, and have come to an interesting puzzle.
A list, specifically a single-column table in iOS, may often have a swipe right gesture for more actions, like the twitter app and mail app, and a million other apps. But when important functionality is embedded in the UI beyond that action, and a user cannot figure it out, the only thing that comes to mind to alleviate that is something like the accessory button, ie. a right-pointing triangle or chevron button.
There is probably another way but it's not coming to me. Maybe making the rows taller than normal?
This was meant as a comment but was rejected as too-long.
So after thinking more about this, the ideal solution is a visual clue, rather than painfully obvious text saying "swipe a row for more options". Perhaps when a list (UITableView, etc) is shown and rows (UITableViewCell, etc) are created and added, then as they appear an animation begins of the main visible content sliding into place in the OPPOSITE direction of the desired swipe animation, with a minimal visual indicator afterward, reminding the user that the content is moveable!
Sound good? Optionally, immediately before the animation begins, any underlying content may be shown for a split second (if its supposed to appear underneath). Sweet!
I have a volume knob and would like to know how to make it respond to user input in android. Please point me in the right direction as i have no idea how i can go about it ? Custom Knob looks like something created in this article. My question is what would be the general approach to port this knob into an android application. Do i have to extend the view class and draw this as a Bitmap. If so how exactly would i respond to user input. If this is not possible and i am on the wrong track could someone please tell me how to achieve this?
I would extend the View class.
View is the baseclass for widgets in android (by widgets I mean textfields, buttons, etc), so I think a volue knob would fit right in among those. About the user input, I'm not so sure. I think it depends on how you want to control the knob. I think looking at the onTouchEvent(MotionEvent) would be a good start. My guess is that you will need to overload a similar method anyways.
Related links:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html
http://www.vogella.com/articles/AndroidGestures/article.html
I have a need to create a circular dial/rotary style component for use in an application. It's essentially a circular menu that allows users to select from the items that are ringed around it, and then they can click the button in the center to activate the selected item. However, I've never created a custom UIView of this type, and don't really know where to begin. Can anyone give me any pointers as to how I would draw the view and then rotate it as the user drags their finger? I obviously know how to intercept touch events, etc. but I'm not sure how to actually go about manipulating the UI appropriately. Any tips or pointers would be great!
I don't know if you've already found a solution to this, but here is a nice overview of how to get started:
http://shahabhameed.blogspot.com/2011/05/custom-views-in-android.html
For you, I think you can extend an existing View, that View being the SeekBar. You can take the standard SeekBar and draw it in a circle.
Finally, here is a source code that does the rotation with a volume knob. It is its own project though, so you have to do some work to use it in your own app.
http://mindtherobot.com/blog/534/android-ui-making-an-analog-rotary-knob/
Good Luck!
I have a neat library to do this. It is extremely stable and well maintained. https://bitbucket.org/warwick/hgdialrepo
Heres a youtube demo: https://youtu.be/h_7VxrZ2W-g
This library comes with a demo app with source code and the demo app actually uses a dial as a menu, So I think this should be the perfect solution for you.