My friend tried my app with his new galaxy tab and it seems it is a little different than the emulator I tested it on. His options menu for the app was dark instead of the white background and you could not really see any of the options and most of the app did not work properly. I made the app on the 2.1 android update and am very stumped I tried searching for something about this but could not find anything. Is there a way to modify to act accordingly if this happens?
Samsung modified a lot of standard themes and images. The only way to fix it, that I found, was to force my own theme and use my own images everywhere.
Since Android 2.3 the menu background has changed to black. But the general color palette for the icons you make shouldn't be that much different. See more here:
Android Menu Design Guidelines
If you wish to have different icons for android version 2.3 and earlier versions put the icons for Android 2.3 and later in a resource folder with -v9 appended to the folder name. Example:
drawable-hdpi-v9
You should do the same thing with notification icons, as android 2.3 really made a big change to the way notification icons should look.
Btw, if you are looking for an easy way to make icons for your application, Roman Nurik's asset studio is really great: http://android-ui-utils.googlecode.com/hg/asset-studio/dist/index.html
Related
I'm using Android Studio, and I always see people's drawable calls to things like ic_launcher. I don't have any of these files - hell, where are they even stored? All of my few files begin with abc_ic. How would I go about getting the icons, and where would I put them?
You can get the system's drawables by
android:drawable/the_drawable_here on XML and
getResources().getDrawable(android.R.drawable.one_random_drawable,null);
programmatically.
abc_ are ActionBarCompat stuff. It's used by ActionBarCompat. For instance, you'll find the overflow icon there (the vertical dots indicating the menu).
Then there is android:drawable/ that contains the system stuff, not always convenient because it varies a lot from a version to another.
Finally, there is https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/ Pretty much all icons ever mentioned in material design are there, in black and white, in all sort of size, and for all densities.
The Android asset studio is a great tool for things like this. It will generate icons for all the main DPIs. It can be found here:
https://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/icons-launcher.html
I am using Eclipse ADT to develop my first Android application.
In Eclipse you can change the theme using the menu shown in the Graphical Layout window. I decided to use the Black theme because I like the way the UI components look using that theme.
One of my UI widgets is a seek bar. Here is how it looks using the Black theme:
When I test (run) my application using the Nexus S virtual device the seek bar looks different:
Why do they look different? (I am guessing that Eclipse is just showing me a preview of what that theme would look like and not actually setting it anywhere and that when I run my app it inherits the theme from the target platform.) Is there a way I can force the look and feel of my app?
Thank you.
Because the Android UI has evolved and changed. The first image you posted is Android 2.2 (ish) and then the second image looks like Android >= 4.0.
Secondly, AFAIK, changing the theme from that menu is ONLY for checking out the apps UI within the GUI layout editor - it will not change the theme on launch within the emulator, or a real device. For that you need to specify the theme within your manifest.
You can change the version of Android being used in the preview too, using the Android icon on the far right of the GUI editor. You can also preview more than one at a time using the far left icon on the same toolbar.
What Rawkode said.
I'll add my two cents:
You can take a look at the HoloEverywhere project if you want to have a consistantly looking application across all Android versions.
The project is essentially a backport of the Holo theme for Android pre 4.0.
You can check it out here:
http://www.holoeverywhere.com/
I am trying to use the rather smart ActionBarSherlock and it is going ok except for 1 rather important thing. The app icon seems to be firmly stuck in the middle of the actionbar.
I am currently deploying on 2.3.4, not using actionbar tabs and using the theme
android:theme="#style/Theme.Sherlock"
Everything works fine except for this. I have also tried it on the emulator.
Any suggestions?
Solved I was stupidly not telling Eclipse that I was designing using android 3.2 or higher.
This messed up the appearance of the actionbar when built.
I also found it essential to build the sherlock library from the downloaded zip file outside my workspace.
Has anyone seen a icon library that has the thin style gray scale look as the new updated android market app?
Yes, install the new SDK APIs and look into these platforms within the SDK folder.
Really don't know what you exactly mean. maybe you post some screenshot or give more details.
here is a list of some quite good icon-packs
if you are searching for psd-templates to get your own icons
vector graphics to use for icons
In 2.2 there is a generic dialog icon (ic_dialog_generic). I used this in my program by accessing android.R.drawable.ic_dialog_generic. It shows up in 2.2, however when I tested it on 2.3.3, nothing showed up.
So I copied the drawable to my project and accessed it by R.drawable.ic_dialog_generic. Once again, it shows up in 2.2 but it still does not show up in 2.3.3.
It seems there was a change with context menu styles? Any idea?
Duplicate question of Dialog icon missing in 2.3
Looking at the 2.3.3 source, this icon is definitely not there. This illustrates why they keep warning us to copy the built in images to our own projects.