I have traveled all over the internet looking for a way to do something that I thought would be very basic. Bottom line is: I have an android UI that I have designed. It consists of buttons that are placed along the middle of the screen. This is sort of a menu screen. These buttons need to be in the SAME location but should just increase or decrease in size in relation to the physical size of the screen. Basically, if i have a button on a screen that is 1px (or dip; dip is what i currently use in my application) X 1px, then, if i double the screen size, the button should auto-format to 2px X 2px. I have done the math on my application. The button that I have is about 225/854 down the screen (this comes out to be about 26.44% from the top.) All I want to do is make that button come down the same amount. Say I reduced the size of the screen to 500, the ratio should stay the same.
Example math work:
(225 dip/854 px)*100=26.44%
so if I reduce the screen size to 500px, the dip should be as follows.
(225dip/854px)*500px = 131.733021077283372 dip
Is this the best way to go about scaling my buttons? If so, how do I tell my application to calculate the correct number of dip that the button should be placed at?
If you are still confused (sorry!), here is a key to looking at that work.
225dip = how far the button comes down from the top of the screen.
854px = physical size (in pixels) of the screen
131.733021077283372 dip = new number of dip if screen is reduced to 500px physical size
You can use the WindowManager to get the screen size. In your activity:
getWindow().getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay().getWidth();
or getHeight() in your case. Once you have that, just do your math, and then:
ViewGroup.LayoutParams buttonLayout = yourButton.getLayoutParams();
buttonLayout.height = 42; // Set your height
buttonLayout.y = 42; //Set distance from top of the screen
and so on. Once done:
yourButton.setLayoutParams(buttonLayout);
Let me know if this works.
If you design your interface using dip (or dp) and sp units (for fonts) you can let Android do the scaling for you. Although maybe not pixel perfect on every device, your app will certainly look the same on many devices in the correct scale.
Supporting multiple screens on http://d.android.com describes this...
I am a bit new to android, although, in the game I am creating I found that it is easiest to allow android to determine the dpi(dots per inch) of the screen and choose my images accordingly.
For example, my games res folder has folders listed as drawable, drawable-hdpi, and more. These folder are here for you to put the corresponding images in for the type of screen.
In the android manifest you can list what screen dpi you support and those folders will be used correctly.
Hope this helps!
EDIT: I would definitely check out this doc page
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
Related
In my activity, I use DisplayMetrics to dynamically get the pixel height and width of the screen, and then I assign each of the components in the Activity sizes based on those dimensions. I wanted to know how this could be affected by screens that have different densities? Is it a good idea to use pixels?
Edit:
The purpose of using pixels dynamically is so that my layout scales based on the given screen. I just want to know how density will play into this. For example, if I have two screens with a height of 1024px and width of 800px, but one is twice as dense as the other, and I want to use 40% of the height and 40% of the width (this is just hypothetical) for a button, why should the density matter? This will just mean that the size of the button will have more pixels in the higher density screen, but the physical size of the button will be the same as DisplayMetrics will always give me the absolute size in pixels. Or am I wrong about this?
See this question and its answers. You will get the answer to your question.
Edit:
From one of the answers on the mentioned question
If you are any serious about developing an Android app for more than one type of device, you should have read the screens support development document at least once. In addition to that it is always a good thing to know the actual number of active devices that have a particular screen configuration.
Screen Sizes and Densities
To help in your case it is proposed to use dp units instead of pixels, but still there will be differences from one device to another.
On a tablet screen with a high pixel density, the elements probably will occupy less relative space.
If you want to improve it more then you will have to do the dimensions calculation by your own.
Or use a layout that auto distributes the space, for example the LinearLayout
Also you have to take into account that it is the system that decides the size of some widgets, for example the standard buttons
I am developing an Android application where the server sends all the values corresponding to dimensions in pixels for 1920*1080 resolution device.I need the app to be supported on multiple screen resolutions.I went through Android documentation on supporting multiple screen resolutions.It suggests to convert pixels to dip and then render.I did that in my application but the views are not rendered as required.So I tried applying simple unitary method by dynamically getting the screen width and height and then scaling all dimensions based on current screen width and height.
Say my current screen width is X and height is Y.So what I did was
Scaling factor in horizontal direction = New Screen Width/1920.
Scaled dimension in horizontal direction = Scaling factor in horizontal direction * Dimension from server in horizontal direction.
Similarly for vertical direction.
The application is now looking fine on my device.But is it a reliable way of doing things ? Should I be dealing with density of display too ?
DP is probably the better approach, if you elaborate a bit on what you mean by 'not rendered as required' I can try to help.
I can think of two main issues with your current method:
Different aspect ratios of devices. Using your method you will end up with distorted imagery. For example a square in 'server dimensions' is 400x400. In a 800x480 phone, that square will be 162x177 - no longer a square. Depending on your visuals and purpose of your app, this may or may not be an issue. If it is an issue, you need to account for that.
Physical views' size. One of the purposes of the DP method is to ensure a view will have (almost ) the same size across different devices, mainly never too small to handle for the user. So using the DP approach, a 100dp button will be 200px on a high density device, and 100px on a medium density device. This way the button is physically the same size on both devices.
But your method ignores that. Take the square from the first example - it will always be a fifth (400/1920) of the width of the screen. This can be either huge or tiny, depending on the device dimensions. Again, depending on your needs this may or may not be a problem.
Your method can work, as long as you account for these (and maybe more) problems. But it does require special care and probably more coding and work to make it work perfectly compared to simply using DP.
I have several buttons in my application that are displayed at the bottom of the screen. Right now the buttons have text in them. When running on the emulator, the buttons with text fit nicely. Now, that I am running on the actual device, some buttons' text takes more than two lines and the screen is not very presentable. I could change the font to make it work for the device in question, but there is no guarantee that it will work on some other device. Should I create button images (with text embedded as part of the image) and then have multiple versions, depending on the size of the device screen being used? That seems like a lot of work, is there a simpler solution to this?
Thank You,
Gary
You need to give equal weights to all buttons.So that all of them look similar and occupy same amount of space.
You have to get screen resolution and set sizes as a proportion of this resolution.
Here is the sample code to obtain screen width and height.
Display display = getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay();
Point size = new Point();
display.getSize(size);
int width = size.x;
int height = size.y;
It is not hard but little bit tricky.
In this purpose you can use built in draw-able folder. In android project there are many draw-able folder like drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi, drawable-xhdpi where you can put different size of images and it will automatically render image based on device screen. Check this tutorial for more understanding Supporting Multiple Screens
Or you can take screen size dynamically. Based on the screen size you can set the button height and width.
You can find multiple screen size handling tutorial here:
Supporting Multiple Screens
your emulator may have specific resolution that is different than the one of your actual device.
What is the applications screen size without the status bar and softkeys(in some phones)?
Like for Example i know:
320X480 trimmed down to 320X455 which is the basesize.
but what about others , i have done many calculations and a lot of searches online to figure out a defined size for other screen but i seems can't, Also While applying the formula *.75 ldpi, *1.5 hdpi, *2.25 xhdpi to get other screen, it doesn't add up.
Like 320X480 is mdpi to get the hdpi do *1.5 and you will get 480X720 which is not the situation for devices out their ! and using this method my application images where stretched, this method is according to the Google documentation, i'm confused as hell.
I have tried to et sizes using the emulator also it was very different! for height.
So if the problem is with height only, i'm thinking creating background as patterns and then work only on the width of the screen size and re-size every other elements to screen width only like 240px, 320px, 480px, 720px and also consider the size of them to fit minimum height.
I believe it's not possible to define a height for android which will go like generic because of the variety of android devices.
So what do you think about this approach to use background as pattern and forget about every device on earth height ?
you can use tile pattern, create a small texture and then make it tileable drawable in xml, so it will be tiled across screen, or the second might be using 9-patch images, in that way you can select which area of the image scale and which area to not scale, so they will be scaled according to that way.
Currently i'm trying to develop a mobile app for the Android devices (using Appcelerator).
There are alot of Android devices out there with different screen resolutions. So i basically want the app to look the same on every Android device.
So suppose i have a background image in the center of the screen. Which is (in pixels) 550x300.
I just tried to set the width and height of the imageviews to dips (density independent pixels). So in my case to: 332dp x 226dp.
I tested this first on an HTC One X. In there the image in nicely centered and i have a small space left on the left and right side to the edge of the screen.
Then i tested it on a slightly older device, the HTC Desire Z. In there the image width is a little bit more than the actual width of the screen. (example screen. The blue square represents the image)
So that means setting the width and height as dp isn't a good choice either for images.
What would be a good way to set the image width and height so that it looks the same on both phones. i.e., so that they both have a small white spaces on the other edges of the image left (like i have now in the HTC One X)??
Any advice on this matter?
edit
Thanks for the info so far. Some of you posted links to resources etc and made some suggestions. I'll try to work them out in the next few days, so i might take a couple of days before i accept an answer. In the mean time, any ideas suggestions are welcome.
Use the various drawable folders, i.e. drawable, drawable-large, drawable-xlarge to store your image assets for your background in various sizes. Review http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providing-resources.html for more information.
Also refer to Android: Scale a Drawable or background image? for helpful information.
I would recommend using a size to fit.
in objective c it looks kinda like this... not much of a android programmer but this may help.
CGRect frame = _textView.frame;
frame.size.height = _textView.contentSize.height;
_textView.frame = frame;
so if you could figure a way to get the frame size then you could set your image to that size any way the view is positioned.
and if you dont want it to take up the whole screen and just the sides then there might be a autoresizing function for android this way your image will be flexible with your frame which will vary based on the phone size.
I think the is problem is not that the image is wider, but the screen width of the phone is smaller on the HTC Desire Z.
I think the best way fot the image to look the same on all devices would be to set width/height programmatically.
But I think this doesn't really matter, as you will encounter much more complicated problems further wil developing for multiple devices. Both look good IMO.
What I would is set your android:layout_width to fill_parent and then add a android:layout_marginLeft and android:layout_marginRight in dip. You can also set a margin for the top and bottom, but based on your screenshots that doesn't seem to be an issue.
As a general rule, try to avoid setting fixed heights and widths for your widgets. Here is a great reference for dealing with different screen sizes:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
So i basically want the app to look the same on every Android device.
No you don't. You think you do, but you really don't. That's like trying to fit a photograph in a 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 frame -- something's gotta give. You have small phones, medium phones, large phones, 7" tablets, 10" tablets -- these are not the same experience and you simply have to allow some leniency to the design to make it work. If you just want a specific amount of space outside of the image, just give your ImageView a specific margin in DP units, e.g.:
<ImageView
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:layout_margin="10dip"
//...
/>
You should be striving to make the experience the same (although different layouts for tablets are highly recommended) but you can't expect it to look identical across all screen sizes and densities.