Is that ok to use absolute layout in my application if i know exactly the x,y that i'll draw the widget at or it'll affect the application appearance on the device ?
I'm asking this question as I've read that it's deprecated
Even if you know exactly where you want to put each widget, you won't know the exact resolution of the devices which will run your application. Some will have empty space left on the screen, while others might not have room to display all your widgets.
Short version: better not use it, there are always better options.
In case of absolute layout, your application will adjust itself in every phn ,of any resolution or screen size. But in case of fixed coordinates may be screen size becomes a limitation.
It is a very bad practice to use absolute layout coordinates.
Don't use it.
Related
Image of XML code and Design Differnce
In this there is a space left right of the image in AVD but in preview, space is fully covered for ImangeView
Same in case if TextView
I want the AVD design same as Preview. Is there any solution of the problem please help
You have to set the layout_centerOrizontal in "true" for each graphical component. It will solve the question of horizontal align issue. But, the preview cannot show all the devices, have this in mind. So, you have to predict somehow to achieve better performance for differents functions and diffents devices.
In your case, with your example, you have to make the all components be on the center (i'm guessing that is what you want). You can work with padding too. So in order to fill the space in a better way (not too empty, like the space below the images on the first image), you can use margin and padding settings that can bring a better looking.
I'm stuck and I think wisdom (aka experience) is the only solution.
I need to be able to have boxes on a screen with data inside each box. The number of boxes on the screen needs to be able to change and the boxes need to scale accordingly (as well as the text data inside of them) to allow for the additional boxes.
Example: I might start with only 8 boxes which are evenly spaced and displaying data at a reasonable font scale.
As I add more boxes I need the rest of the boxes to scale down and allow everything on one screen.
I am currently attempting to use a TableLayout, but I'm not certain how to make everything scale correctly. Also, I'm generating everything programmatically by extending the TableLayout. Can someone point me in the right direction. Is there a better layout method that I'm not seeing? I'm sure I'm not the first person to need this, so are there examples available that I'm just not finding by searching?
The eventual solution was to build my own scaling function which took screen pixel dimensions and calculated the appropriate margin offsets to use on a relative layout. It requires a complete redraw each time the scaling factor changes, which is annoyingly resource intensive.
I was working with Android UI in Eclipse and found it to be bit hectic. Designing layout using layout managers is bit time consuming. So i was wondering whether it is possible to specify the position of the UI elements based on (x,y) system i.e top and left property which is widely used in Visual Studio IDE for VB,C# etc ?
Positioning element based on top and left property would provide much flexibility.
How would that be flexible? Yes, doing layout correctly takes time, but if you do it right, it will scale properly to any screen size. If you're using X/Y coordinates, you will be hardcoding to a specific screen size, which is an especially bad idea on Android (as there are a multitude of screen sizes available).
If you need x, y positioning, you can use a FrameLayout with foregroundGravity set to top|left, and use layout_marginLeft for the x value, and layout_marginTop for the y value.
You can use AbsoluteLayout and suppress deprecation warnings in your code, but think of how will it look on different screen sizes?
I would advise to use RelativeLayout in your case.
As far as I know, there is no built-in layout that is based on (x, y) coordinates. You might be able to find 3rd party libraries that can do this for you. However, I'm skeptical that they will provide satisfactory results. Remember that Android is deployed on a wide variety of devices which include a range of different screen sizes and resolutions. This means that you can make the UI look pretty on one device using specific coordinates but it won't look very good on other devices.
Personally, I edit my UI layouts directly in the XML files. I find that this provides me better control than using the Eclipse UI editor. You still have to learn how the layout managers themselves work.
Android tries to ensure that your layout components are arranged nicely so that they:
don't overlap with each other
don't go off the screen space
look similar on different screen sizes
etc
It gives you nice XML Attributes to help you arrange your layout. I would recommend you use RelativeLayout for this application, because it allows you to put your layout components in positions RELATIVE to each other.
Some XML attributes you can specify are given here: Android Reference, RelativeLayout.LayoutParams
I am newbi in android world and working on an android app.
I have used many of buttons and image buttons in my app.
Now i want to replace them with an background image. (So i can make nice gui easily)
I know i can use view listener and i can find the clicked x and y coordinate from onclick method.
But I want to how can i find which part of the image was clicked. Because different phones have different resolutions how can i do this efficiently ?
And one more thing, Is it good to handle gui this way ?
Thanks !
You first need to set the initial window width and height before execution of other code and load an image of quality based on the screen size. so for example you can have 3 sets of images of different size. One for 5 inch screens and below. Another for 7 inch tablets. Another for 10 and possibly another super high quality image for anything above. As many devices coming on in the near future are reaching resolutions much higher then previously developed for. Just run code initially that detects the initial window size at hand and load image based on resolution of that device. From their program as you plan to.
Also to jump on answer above. Detect rotation event and adjust image accordingly. and update accordingly. You are adding more programming of course but no reason what you are asking could not be done. Just a few extra events detection and you should be good to go to accomplish exactly what you are looking to do
AFAIK it is not good practice to handle the GUI this way. Mostly because android screen size is not standard and so you can never be sure that it will work perfectly in all the devices. You can ofcourse handle the events using onTouchListener and see which part of image was clicked from the coordinates in the MotionEvent Object. But, I would not recommend doing so.
Creating layouts of different screen sizes and handling the events using Buttons and ImageButtons will be good.
you can use android:background attribute for background images in the layout xml files...
however you also can set the background of UI element programatically
I am developing an application for whole android devices. But resolation of screens are different and that is the biggest problem how it looks. So, I want to make resizing controls and also I used absolutelayout but It is still same.. I give value to controls as dp ..
How can I solve this problem ?
You don't resize the screen of an android device - you make your app instead work with the various screen sizes.
The relevant docs are here.
You cannot hardcode the dimensions of your layout and expect it to work on every screen size. And there is no method which automatically does it unless you write it.
You might want to change your approach, use Relative Layout or Linear Layout instead and use values like fill_parent and wrap_content while designing your layout.
Another approach Android developers follow is use different resource files for different screen sizes and Android loads them automatically at runtime.
Refer to this for more info on how to work with different screen sizes effectively.