I'm very new to android and I am wondering how I can have 2 windows displaying content at the same time.
Here is an example:
I have a HorizontalScrollView at the bottom of the screen which houses the buttons for a menu. Above it, I would like a window(like a JFrame) that I can change depending on which button from the menu was pressed. The ScrollView menu must remain unchanged an exist as a separate entity(if you know what I mean).
How can I go about doing this? I don't want to have to draw the menu every time a user click a button and a new page is displayed. I have a feeling it has something to do with intents and Activities, but I'm not sure.
Hope someone can help me out.
Thanks.
I'm very new to android and I am wondering how I can have 2 windows displaying content at the same time.
Interpreting you literally, you can't, but that's because "window" does not mean what you think it does.
Here is an example: I have a HorizontalScrollView at the bottom of the screen which houses the buttons for a menu.
Get rid of it and replace it with an options menu, so your application blends in with the platform.
Above it, I would like a window(like a JFrame) that I can change depending on which button from the menu was pressed. The ScrollView menu must remain unchanged an exist as a separate entity(if you know what I mean). How can I go about doing this?
Option #1: Get rid of the HorizontalScrollView, use an options menu, and use separate activities for each "window"
Option #2: Use a ViewFlipper, with one child of the ViewFlipper for each "window".
Of the two, Option #1 will generally be much better, for memory management, state management, code complexity, and UI design.
Could TabLayout be your answer :
http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/views/hello-tabwidget.html
Related
I am new to writing Android apps, I have been using the internet and Android Studio to create an app for my club as a bit of fun and learn along the way. I have been watching videos, using tutorials and walkthroughs and I am getting to learn the basics.
However, I have got stuck. I used a drawer template from Android Studio and added the activities I needed and buttons on the main screen to the activities and they all worked fine, no overlapping. When I tried to link the drawer icons to the activities, rather than use the buttons on the main screen, they work, but the app (visually) puts the next activities content on top of the one before.
I cant find anything on the internet except something called backstacking, but that is described when the back arrow is used, my problem is to do with selecting an activity from the drawer menu. I have attached a picture to show what I mean. It gets worse the more menu items that are selected.
If anyone could help, it would be great!
If you are using XML root layout as a constraint layout maybe your constraints are missing. If you are using constraint layout set both top/bottom and left/right constraint.
If your constraints only top for example it is look good on desing but in device that dont know where to positioning left or right and automatically positioning 0 point to top.
When you click one any one menu item put the visibility of other images as gone like
visibility(View.GONE);
and the one selected to be visible
One activity in my app looks like below picture. In the below picture ,can any one suggest that best way to implement view,
view in my app
and when i click one of the options(filters in app) available on activity,
the view will be extended like below
view after one of the option selected
For this, i want to use a horizontal linear layout for below options bar,
when one of the options clicked, i wanna use slide up functionality and views show and hide functionalities.
can any one suggest better design for this . thanks.
I think for most apps, all toolbars should stay in the same place throughout the execution of the app. When the toolbar item ("Veg & Non Veg") is clicked, the filter should appear above the toolbar instead of below it. You can still use the slide up function, just have the toolbar layout displayed above (higher z-index) the filter linear layout.
You should also standardize the sizes for the distances/times to each location, personally I think the first one looks better.
Other than that, I think your UI looks pretty good!
I'm working on implementing a UI for an Android application, and I wanted to ask if there is already something in the native widgets to accomplish most of what I'm trying to do.
The application that I'm working on performs 15 different tasks that can be divided into 3 different groups. (5 tasks per group) I have 18 icon images (3 for the groups and 15 for the individual tasks) and I want to be able to panel these icons (starting with the groups) like this:
I want the next icon visible below and above (if further down than the first icon) and swipe to go to the next icon
Once an icon is clicked, the panels slide to the side, exposing the next layer (the specific 5 tasks for the selected group) with the selected group still visible on the side:
From there, the user can tell at a glance what group they are in, what the current, next and previous selectable tasks are, and that by swiping right, they can get back to the group selection.
What types of widgets would I need to look into in order to accomplish something like this? Are there already pre-built lists to do these activities?
Thanks for any guidance!
You can get close with a LinearLayout of ImageView widgets and a ScrollView (vertical) or HorizontalScrollView. However, it will not give you the desired "centered image with bits of the previous/next images" effect -- it will be wherever the user positions it.
You can get close with a Gallery. However, it will not give you the vertical orientation, and it will always give you a fixed set of full options to the sides, not the partial images that you seek.
If it's gotta be the way you describe it, you'll have to roll it yourself. Gestures and animations should give you the desired effect.
Have you taken a look at ViewFlipper? http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ViewFlipper.html This will give the side by side effect but you will have to make custom views for each group to populate it with the proper icons.
I'd use a ListActivity for the first 3 top level items. This won't give you the auto centering effect that you'll probably want, but you should be able to look at the Gallery source code, which can be found here, and make some modifications to the ListActivity so that it autocenters.
For the next items, I'd add an onClick and a GestureListener so you can navigate to another activity with another list view. Since you know where you came from (add some data to your Intent) you can set the color rectangle on the left so that it appears that you have just swiped the whole view left.
If you need to customize the animation, you can call this:
overridePendingTransition(R.anim.slide_left_entry, R.anim.slide_left_exit);
To make the yellow icon look good as it animates to the left, I'd change the list bounds (on the first activity) to have no margins, and change the yellow icon to have square right edges - This will make the small yellow rectangle on the next activity appear to be part of the first activity.
It should be relatively easy to mock this up to see if it's going to work properly for you.
Good luck!
EDIT: Ok, so I've made a basic project that does most of what you want.
here is the link to the eclipse project file. I was going to put the source up here, but there's a bit much to display.
What you still have to do:
Tweak animation
Configure the layer lists to display the correct colors
Add information to the top level intent for the sub-activity to be able to configure itself.
Quite a few other small things.
I think I've got the main stuff done. I've also added the gesture listener I talked about, although re-reading your question, you actually didn't ask for that. Since it's cool, I left it in.
Good Luck once again!!
Have you thought of launching Activities with different view configurations? You can switch from one activity to another with a gesture and you can Animate the views. What your UI looks like to me is a bunch of screens with affordances that show the other screens. So one Activity per screen maybe the same in different configurations or something like that.
I'm new into android and i'm dealing with the following problem. I need to create a button which groups another two buttons of similar features (sort of submenu). So let's say we have a button called "search", by clicking on it the search button should disappear and the two buttons (e.g. "google" and "bing") should be seen on the screen.
So, my idea was to manage all three buttons programmatically in the same layout instead of creating a new (temp)layout just to show and handle the two buttons. Like a state machine. More precisely it would be like this:
We press on the "search" button.
onClick(View) determines wheter we are on the main screen (mode=mainmenu), renames the search button to "google" and creates the second button named "bing", or (mode=submenu) then call the function of the button due to the search button is already renamed to "google"...
By pressing the back button onBackPressed() checks if we are in the submenu (mode=submenu) then hide the "bing" button and rename "google" to "search", otherwise we are in the main menu (mode=mainmenu), finish the activity.
Does this make sense at all? Besides this will produce lots of code with rising count of buttons and (sub)menus and worse maintainability for further changes.
Thanks!
P.S. Sorry if my english sucks (not my native language) ;-)
That's too much code and too much debugging will be needed, so I think, a better way is just creating a new layout.
Well if you have performance issues or expecting performance issues can arise (due to complexity of you GUI) then may be this make sense. But if not, code simplicity is more important than slight increase in performance.
You can create an button that remain invisible(gone, to be exact) until the "search" button is pressed, and rename the original search button. It works, and it will be easier to implement if you set up layout in xml. It also give you a preview that shows what it looks like. To show widget programmatically will have code that hard to maintain.
However, the design that change button text is not a good design. First, when the "search" is pressed, changing its text is very confusing. I personally suggest you to pop-out a selection dialog. Or just show both search button at first place, unless you really do not have place for two button.
I've activity that i want an option menu to be displayed on. But, i want the option menu to be displayed all the time the activity is displayed. I don't want my users to click (select) the menu button to display it. I want it to be there all the time. How can i do it?
thanks
Activity.openOptionsMenu().
From a design standpoint, I have to agree with Mayra. Wrong approach to begin with.
If you want options to appear at the bottom of the screen always, don't use the options menu. Just place buttons at the bottom of your screen.
However, keep in mind that this goes against the "Android way" of doing things, so make sure you understand how Android users are going to expect your application to look and work, and you have a good reason for doing something different.