I have a problem in android application interface design(GUI).
For example when we insert an editText field the height is too big. Yes we can change the width and bit modify.
But does anyone have any link of a reference or idea of how to design the exact design we want. And when we add 2 -3 editText(views) the entire space finish. have to scroll to go through entire page.
And to design the GUI for all kind of screen sizes, what are the standard things that have to follow. I searched but didn't find exact answer.
Any link to a good reference or idea is highly appreciated.
Thank you
set the layout of text edit with:
layout_width="wrap_content" //wrap_content fill the dimension like the content and fill_content all the space free
layout_height="wrap_content"
In order to make your app resolution free you have to take care for the following items
Widgets in your activity (wrap_content, match_parent, fill_parent, or left, right gravity in relative layout etc)
Icons and Images in your activity (You have to keep icons of 3 different sizes in 3 different drawable folders, hdpi, mdpi and ldpi and if you are making your app for tablets also then xdpi (i think))
You have to provide similar text sizes for different screen sizes (3 sizes should be suffice I believe) You can make a general xml file for this and keep it in another drawable folder.
Let me know if you need more detail on this.
Related
I have a design that I need to follow in my app. In it there are several buttons, images and textviews placed all over the screen (some are aligned to the left, some to the right, some are centered etc). What I need to do is make all those elements appear EXACTLY as they are in the design image. The problem is, if I try to do this using dp, it can be wider or narrower than the design image specifies, and it depends on the properties of the screen. (I've had an app where I did it all in dp, and on my high-res phone it works perfectly, but on my friend's older phone it cuts away the edges of the activity)
My question is, what elements do I use for this? I've heard of using weight in Linear Layouts, but how to make items different width and height and position them all across the screen how I see fit? How to make sure it looks exactly the same on all screen sizes?
Thanks in advance! :)
Edit:
The point is, I need the buttons to be just as they are on the screen (this will be a listview element, I'm trying to make an xml for it). The distance, proportion, everything, it needs to scale to the width of the screen and be this size and distribution. And, I'm not just looking for a solution to THIS particular problem, I want to learn how to do it in general...
You don't. For very large and very small screens, you use separate layouts that scale the sizes, completely drop parts of the UI, or lays it out in a different manner. It's absolutely silly to think you can fit all the stuff on a 10 inch tablet and a 3.5 inch phone. If your designer expects that, tell him he's an idiot and he needs to get back to work.
For a more general answer on the best way of laying things out- it depends on the effect you're trying to get. You should never use pixel counts, and dp should only be used for small things- a bit of padding between 2 fields. Most things should be done via layout, either by using a linear layout and getting things in rows/columns, or a RelativeLayout and describing how to layout views relative to their siblings. But even with these tools you will not be able to fit on all screens and look good.
In my android application, I have a problem that when I run my application, its not fit to the emulator and some part cut on it like below:
And also you can see below I have a button also on it like below image:
But its not show me the full image, means a button is missing on the emulator.
How can I resolve it. kindly suggest me, waiting for reply.
Thanks
Basically, your designer and emulator are using different screen dimensions.
You can change the designer to use the same screen dimensions. Currently, from your screen shot you're using the Nexus One layout. From what I can tell the emulator doesn't look like the Nexus One screen dimensions.
With Android it isn't as simple as 1 layout for all dimensions, screen sizes and devices. You have to implement multi-screen support to address this. You can usually do this by having a variance on dimensions, styles and layouts. A lot of the time one layout will work universally, but dimensions often need tweaking.
See http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html for more on Supporting Multiple Screens.
It is a problem that can occur in real devices (remember, we have loads and loads of different screen sizes for android) so you definitely need to fix it.
The best way to avoid this is to wrap the entire layout inside a ScrollView, so the user can scroll to see all the content of your layout.
If you are trying to fit all the elements on the screen then you need to account for different screen sizes and densities. In your particular case you are building the screen on a different sized screen than the emulator.
Assuming you do not want the screen to scroll (which is solved using a ScrollView), then to fix this, you can do the following:
Build different XML layouts for different screen sizes
Use dimen files to specify different sizes for some or all elements on the screen so that they re-size depending on the screen size.
Use weighted LinearLayout so that Android re-sizes the elements according to the screen they are placed on.
Each of these is pretty easy to search and find various ways of doing.
I'm working on the layout of an android application. But I have a question about the layout. Once i have created a layout and then go to another screen (for instance 4 inches to 5 inches) all my buttons and text boxes are messed up..
Is there a method to make everything static, so that my layout works on every mobile phone..
What kind of layout are you using, could it be RelativeLayout? that might be your problem in this particular instance.
Anyway, in android there are many screen sizes, each of them you should handle with different layouts depending on orientation, size and density. There is no magic formula as far as I know, but 9-patch images can help a lot. Another thing you should do is make sure that you understand how match_parent and wrap_content values work for height and width.
Check this out: Suppoting different screens
You have to create folders for different types of screens take a look at android developers training
This document contains everything you need.
Instead of having everything fixed, it shows how to design a layer that adapts to the various screens you may encounter.
I'm using API 10.
I want to make my layout looking the same across all devices. I can achieve that by using LinearLayout with weights. It works perfectly. As seen on the image below, this is exactly what I want to achieve and it works perfectly:
But the problems that occur are two:
1)I get a warning of low performance because of nested weights.
2)I can't make animations out of bounds of the parent LinearLayout,
as shown in the image below:
So, I decided to make my layout with RelativeLayout. But the major problem is that I can't get the same layout across all devices, like LinearLayout and usage of weights. I spent two days searching for a solution and reading the ADT documentation. According to the documentation I have to make my ImageViews scaled to a factor of 3:4:6:8:12, to match the ldpi/mdpi/hdpi/xdpi/xxdpi. So I did: I created the corresponding #drawble folders, re-sized my buttons as the document says, and placed them inside the matching folders. The result is this:
This is a mess, it is totally unacceptable, for two reasons:
1) Screens may be of a certain density, for example hdpi, but they
differ from device to device of a certain screen size.
2) When I use the dp units relative to an element, for example: from
top of parent, the value I provide differs from screen size to screen
size. It is not by percentage like in LinearLayout.
So, where do I go from here? I concluded from my reasearch, that the only(or not?) solution is to make different layouts for different densities AND screen sizes. Like res/layout-mdpi-large/my_layout.xml and so on. But how do I calculate the dp for sizes and distances from relative components, based on the screen sizes? Do I have to resort to this list? Are these all the devices?:
Any tips, best practices, guides for the workflow, anything?
I am creating an application which on one view has an image of an elephant. this elephant needs to animate various parts of his body such as eyes, trunk, spraying water, and also the background/horizon movements. I have briefly tried positioning each element(eye, trunk, etc) in a RelativeLayout using margins and relative positions so that the picture looks correct.
When i change the screen size via eclipse layout editor everything gets out of place. I read that using RelativeLayout with margins and relative positions will be the best alternative to AbsoluteLayout, but i can't seem to get each piece in the right spot while keeping some compatibility of devices.
What is the best way of positioning pieces of the image to complete a full image which will also allow me to animate/translate/rotate/etc each piece and support a large variety of devices?
I thought that maybe using OpenGL or Canvas might be the way this is done properly, but i don't see how these would resolve the problems i've mentioned.
I have created the iOS version of this application and it was extremely easy to set this up. I don't quite understand how applications line up sprites to make a scene which is compatible among a large variety of screen sizes/densities.
You will have to scale the elements of your big picture to fit the High , medium and low screen densities .
To do this you will have to resize each set of elements and copy them into separate drawable folders :
/res
drawable-hdpi
drawable-ldpi
drawable-mdpi
also you can create a dedicated layout for each screen category if needed but first try just to scale the images and copy them into the folders and launch your application.
A good link to see also : http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
P.S: make sure to use dp not pix as measurement unit on your layouts , also the use of absolutelayout is not a good choice it's deprecated.