Is there a way to draw ontop of every view (like a watermark that shows everywhere for example)? sort of how the Dock4Droid app draws a a dockbar ontop of every screen.
Your best bet is to have a relative layout as your top level container. The very last item in your markup should be an imageview containing your watermark which you can then position on the screen anywhere you like.
As an alternative, you can do your own drawing (onDraw) and set the opacity value such that it gives the presentation of being translucent. Works for me with several of my requirements.
I don't think this is possible, as android app drawing is effectively sandboxed.
Even if you could, why would you want to? It seems like a major annoyance for your users. I know I would uninstall an app that did that.
Related
I currently have an app that looks like this, it's a terminal emulator:
and if I press settings this appears on the screen:
However I would like to overlay some custom graphics on top, so that they are always there, some curves etc. Rough sketch:
So even when settings aren't visible this overlay would be shown on the terminal, at the top, around the edges etc. When I press settings I'd like them to come down and match the height of the graphics at the top like I have drawn, the bottom of the overlay matches the bottom of the settings. Is it possible to just have this overlay over everything? Or what is the best way to do this?
Assuming then that you've created your layout using standard Android layouts and Views then my gut feeling is that trying to achieve the overlay is not possible (Using standard Views/Layouts is a trade off between ease-of-use and flexibility).
My own instinct tells me to take a look at using a SurfaceView to create ALL of your UI. This does means a lot of rework but you gain the flexibility I think you need to achieve your aim.
I would like to make a simple Android game where a large background image is displayed and some other images are displayed in specific locations over it, where the other images may be clickable.
Here's a quick sample image of what I'm talking about:
The user should be able to tap the soccer player or the moose (ah, the classic "soccer player moose problem"!)
How should I render this screen (which layouts and views?) so the user can interact with it and it will scale properly on different devices?
I would use a RelativeLayout.
You can set the you background image to the layout (fill_parent for height and width).
You can then put your ImageViews, containing your moose and soccer player down on the layout relative to the top or sides of the sceen, or relative to each other (making sure to specify "dp" units for everything). Set the backgrounds of your ImageViews to be transparent, and there won't be a bounding box problem (and/or you can also set your ImageViews alignment to be relative to each other, ensuring they don't overlap).
I think this is the simplest way to do this - it is then super easy to attach onClickListener to your ImageViews in your Activity, and you are done.
This type of layout will work the same on all devices and screen sizes.
There are some small gotcha's with RelativeLayouts, but they are pretty simple once you get into them, and provide fast rendering (since the view hierarchy is usually shallow). Good Luck.
ImageView for the clickable elements seems like a fine choice to me. For the background I would just set your image as the background of the parent layout i.e. RelativeLayout
SurfaceView for the whole thing (with your field as a background) and regular *ImageView*s for added elements. You can easily recover the click coordinates from the SurfaceView and thus know what element has been touched.
SurfaceView might offer you additional possibilities anyway.
For most images, I'd use an ImageView for each one, like FoamyGuy said.
If they're close enough for overlapping bounding boxes to be an issue, you can still use an ImageView for each, but with a variation of this answer, testing alpha for each ImageView in range.
I would agree with both FoamyGuy and Booger that if your only goal is to place static images onto the screen that do something when you click them, RelativeLayout and ImageViews all the way.
But...
If you are looking to randomly spawn multiple images onto the screen in intervals and have them move around for the player to interact with while explosions are going off and maidens are being kidnapped, you should look into SurfaceView, Canvas, Drawable, TouchEvents, and FrameBuffers.
I want my app to run on a wide variety of android devices in portrait only. I have a whole-screen background image that includes borders for other components. I want to place items like listviews/sponsor ads accurately within those borders... overlay them on top of the background in exactly the right place. Is using Framelayout the best/easiest way to do this? How do I make sure I get the listviews or sponsor ads in exactly the right place, and exactly the right size given that the background will be stretched to different dimensions for different devices? I've considered cutting up the background image instead but that seems like more work. What's the best approach? Thanks for any thoughts!
Unfortunately, this scheme is never going to work consistently across all screen sizes. If you want borders, you need to create 9-patch graphics out of those and assigne them as teh background to the UI item.
I wanna start a new project. A little "Jump n Run", but I have questions:
The levels will be bigger than the screen. How can I make a big Layout and edit it?
And how do the view "follows" the player, if he moves.
I dont want code samples. I only want basic ideas how to do it.
I suggest you have a look at the SurfaceView. It allows you to render bitmaps to the screen. In your case you could create a bitmap that is larger than the screen and have the user navigate it with the use of their finger (so you'll also have to also use your touchscreen). Basically what you will be changing when the user wants to go to a new location would be the src rect parameter in the drawBitmap method.
I hope this gets you started.
You could specify the layout to whatever pixel size you want (even if it's larger than any screen size would be), and then use scroll views to allow the user to scroll to other areas of the screen. Check out the Android developer docs on horizontal scroll view.
At the moment, I am using Euro 2012 app and it has some interesting layout parts. If you go to matches->knockout screen, you'll see 3 screens like this.
If you slide left or right, you move between them not like between one activity to another, but just like all these elements are laid on one big canvas and you slide each screen into focus. Even thou, if you slide left/right, the screen cannot be stopped in the way that half of each image is visible, so I guess it's not a big canvas. Somehow you can slide screen like one big image, and yet it always lock perfectly as if they used 3 activities for this.
How did the do this?
It's a ViewPager, available in Android support package and described in their blog.
The designing is not so much difficult, As i think to draw that boxes showing quarterfinals, semifinals.
They having layout( we can do by placing image in background also).
The major role played by FrameLayout which shows you that effect(emphasis), the flages are fetch from url as matches are decided(not essentially images only names are sufficient as flags came inside app and gets applied as updated).
After your click i think the start image gets change it's just replacing that image with new one.
As you said they are not on single canvas (but if they did customization of heir Viewpager that it's not stopping in between activities), but i think it's on single canvas.
If your taking about quickness of loading and all it's up to you as much code and processing you optimized it gives you smooth feel and fast processing.
We can appreciate the work but we can not say it's too much difficult as i think it's quit easy...
Hope this explanation helps you to understand ....