I'm developing an application for Android using Burrito, and I came across a certain situation that I can't seem to find out how to solve. Which is, how do you change the ActionBar look and feel?
I can create a skin with the class ActionBar as its host component but (I hate buts so much) how do you actually use it then? How do you apply it to a view? It's just because I want to change its height. I don't really see any problem in it but my boss wants it smaller, so how can I accomplish this?
1) Try to change the look&feel with css color schemes such as backgroundColor, color, ... (full list here: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flex/using/WS2db454920e96a9e51e63e3d11c0bf69084-7f85.html)
3) If you need more advanced styling/skinning, good luck because mobile skins have been developped fully with AS3 and looking at the default ActionBarSkin, it looks scary :)
Related
How can i make the ActionBar Epic as this one ?
Also normally in Google Apps, when we swipe down the action bar actually get shrinked down in size with a beautiful effect, is that effect available for developers? or we have to do it on our own ? And how can we do it?
In this image overhere, there's icon and text above the image, and also a rounded button, i wonder if this sample is documented and i'm missing it, hope guys you'll point that out!
Also how can they add text to the ActionBar??
Hope you'll help! Thanks!
This is all from the new Materials Theme that is going to be available in the next version of Android. You can find out more at the Android L Developer Preview site.
You may use this project available on github to implement your epic actionbar.
Regarding icons/buttons, simply use drawables or 9-patch to get it done.
I want to create a custom title bar, somewhat like this, in my Android app. Please pardon if my question seems idiotic, I'm a beginner. Can anyone tell me if it is a titlebar or an Action bar? Plus how can I give this Shaded Black color to my titlebar/action bar?
PS: I'm using GingerBread on my Android. My app will require minimum SDK version to be 4 but it targets Jelly bean too. In GingerBread, I can't make use of ActionBars. Please help me with the problem. It would be highly appreciated.
You will want to use the ActionBarSherlock library for this (which will allow you to use this all the way back to SDK version 4).
It is reasonably easy to style, and is for sure the right way to do this. Lots of examples for this, as it is a very popular library.
http://actionbarsherlock.com/
If you are wanting to target min API 4, then as you state you'll be unable to use the ActionBar.
So you could just create your bar as a LinearLayout or something with whatever buttons / icons you want on it and have it at the top of all of your Activities. If you have many of them it would probably be worth it to refactor the Bar (click handlers and such) handling into a subclass of Activity, and then extend that with all of your other activities.
The visual effect could be easily achived with a 9-patch png set as the background of a LinearLayout. Just make the gradient you want in photoshop/Gimp and drop it into draw9Patch to add the pixels on the edge that will allow it to stretch nicely to fit any screen.
Edit: using actionbar sherlock as others suggested is probably a better idea than doing it "manually" as I suggested.
I am currently trying to get the look of my app right. But I am having problems figuring out how to even set up a way to change themes. For one thing, is there even a way to change styles through code? I checked the method list and I saw nothing. This leads me to my actual question; is there a way that, like CSS, in which you style the parent, and then have it trickle down but also changed depending on the View? I looked at the Android docs, and they did not show any examples of this. Hopefully someone can give me an idea as to how to accomplish this, or if its not possible, to let me know that as well. Thanks in advance.
You should be able to do this using styles and themes. I've implemented this using Jake whartons Sherlock action bar. (I'm not certain if it's necessary) It involves using the comparability library which gives you the ability to use fragments and loaders as well. Look at his democode at http://actionbarsherlock.com/download.html. Look for where themes are mentioned and you will find the information you need. In the demo app you can change the theme in the top right corner and see how it affects the activities look and feel. It also shows many of the features available and the code to write them. I have found this an invaluable resource and it should show you how to theme your app.
There are lots of way to style ListViews to give them elegant look, but all of them involve modyfying the adapter or writing additional code.
With the release of Android 4.0, unfortunetely things have to change. Google polished their Holo theme and gave it new look. All of the developers are now encouraged to use it, in order to make all apps look the same.
And here's the problem. Google rolled out 4.0, but there are still people using older Android versions. We can't just leave our previous custom application themes and use Holo, because it will ruin visual experience for users with older devices. And we can't force 4.0 users just to use Holo, because let's be honest - it's still not perfect.
The goal is to use builtin themes system and prepare some alternatives for Holo, which will look great on all devices. Then we can just switch between Holo and our themes with just setTheme() and no additional problems. Unfortunetely it's not that simple. We are limited to the capabilities of existing theme system and some things are just hard to do. And here comes my question.
Taking everything I've mentioned into consideration, how can we control ListView look? I'm not able to figure out, how to:
create list with rounded corners and make sure the selector background doesn't ruin it when selecting first/last element
create rounded corners not for the list but sections separated by headers, something like here:
The solution should affect ListViews created by PreferenceActivity without any additional lines of code. Everything should be contained in the theme:
<theme name="SampleTheme" parent="android:Theme">
...
</theme>
I kindly ask not to post solutions that do not use styles & themes. They can be easily found in another questions, here on Stack Overflow.
Thanks in advance.
I can see two ways to solve this.
One is simply to use a theme for your listviews specifying the background, which in turn is a 9 patch with rounded corners or an xml shape you specify (with rounded corners as well). This will have the side-effect of the listview row selector appearing 'over' the background you specified, therefore kind of spoiling the effect. It is quite straightforward to implement though.
The second option is to simply always add headers and footers to your listviews, which have backgrounds that are selectors with rounded corners on top (and bottom). You can specify styles for these as well if you really want to.
Sorry for this last comment, but I had to say it. Please don't try to make your app look like an iPhone app :)
Could anyone tell me either what this widget is or how it could be recreated? I'm having to port over a iPhone app, and my boss wants me to make it look as similar as possible, but while using android controls. Here is a picture of it in Android:
http://cdn3.staztic.com/screenshots/android-swim-32-2.jpg
Thanks!
It is not a standard thing, but for this purpose, there is a: QuickAction dialog.
this can be done with a PopupWindow (it can also be shown as dropdown) where the background is a custom nine-patch file and the content is a listview (or any other view that fits your needs).
I'm sure that GreenDroid Library can do this but I don't know the name of the class to use