I'm trying to sort the layout for one of my Android apps, but I'm finding layouts a nightmare.
Principally I have to have a portrait and landscape layout for normal, small and large screens. So thats 6 layouts to maintain to start with, let alone having to launch the app on three emulators each time because my UI widets don't load in the built in previewer.
I might be showing my ignorance as a fairly new developer, but there must be a better way!
Are there any tools out there to help with Android layouts?
Thanks
You dont need to have that many layouts. Design only as many as you need, and never use absolute values, aditionally try to make everything look nice using fill_parent and wrap_content for you layout_width & layout_height tags. Android does most of the work it self.
This article contains a lot of usefull info:
Supportng multiple screens
You may find this applicaiton helpful for designing your layouts:
http://www.droiddraw.org/
Also, if you don't specify a layout for each rotation, android will use one - infact it can use one for everything. If you use fixed values it makes it much harder. Try using fill_parent and wrap_content, you android will take care of scaling the view for each screen type and rotation too.
As a tip, don't forget to include:
<ScrollView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content">
above your relative or linear layout, and:
</ScrollView>
at the end - that way if the view doesn't fit on the screen (ie too much content) it will allow the user to scroll.
Eclipse's built in layout "editor" shows a reasonably good example of what a layout looks like. I would assume you're writing your application in Eclipse. If not, I highly recommend it. While not perfect, it's the best environment I've found.
you just need to master the proper use of RelativeLayout's and LinearLayout's. Almost all of my Layouts will start with a Relative and have Linear nested inside.
I generally don't use LinearLayouts without having either height or width set to 0 and using the weight attribute to make everything the same size.
Related
I'm creating an application in Android Studio, but the application does not work on multiple screen sizes. I've seen on the internet, people using different xml files with the same name (just change the "setting" it, how large and etc). The best way to do the layout of my application is to use different xml for each screen size? Or does it have an easier way to create an xml and use this for the various screen sizes?
And to complete, I'm using the relative layout, but on the internet, people say that to use LinearLayout, which is better?
Thank you for your help and sorry for my english!
I'm creating an application in Visual Studio, but the application does not work on multiple screen sizes. I've seen on the internet, people using different xml files with the same name (just change the "setting" it, how large and etc). The best way to do the layout of my application is to use different xml for each screen size? Or does it have an easier way to create an xml and use this for the various screen sizes?
Yes. If you want to support a different layout for a larger / smaller screen size, you have to provide a diffrent xml file. You can do this by creating a layout folder. https://developer.android.com/training/multiscreen/screensizes
On the other hand, if you think your project can reuse other layouts of your app and jam them together if the screen is larger, you probably use fragments for these kinds of situations.
And to complete, I'm using the relative layout, but on the internet, people say that to use linear layout, which is better?
The type of layout you use depends on your use-case. LinearLayout for example is very useful for a simple layout with components arrange vertically or horizontally. If your layout is more complex, a RelativeLayout would be better to use BUT...
I would recommend you to use ConstraintLayout instead of a RelativeLayout. The two layouts position items relative to other components but ConstraintsLayout is way more powerful that RelativeLayout. You should take a look at it.
I'm working on the layout of an android application. But I have a question about the layout. Once i have created a layout and then go to another screen (for instance 4 inches to 5 inches) all my buttons and text boxes are messed up..
Is there a method to make everything static, so that my layout works on every mobile phone..
What kind of layout are you using, could it be RelativeLayout? that might be your problem in this particular instance.
Anyway, in android there are many screen sizes, each of them you should handle with different layouts depending on orientation, size and density. There is no magic formula as far as I know, but 9-patch images can help a lot. Another thing you should do is make sure that you understand how match_parent and wrap_content values work for height and width.
Check this out: Suppoting different screens
You have to create folders for different types of screens take a look at android developers training
This document contains everything you need.
Instead of having everything fixed, it shows how to design a layer that adapts to the various screens you may encounter.
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'm prone to abusing LinearLayout, every screens there's usually three or four-level deep. Layout's design usually given size in percentages. Graphic cut to pieces and not utilizing 9-Patch. All of these resulting in me using layout_weight to represent percentages almost everywhere. Today I updated ADT and Lint has this nested weights warning everywhere. Now I'm really concern about the performance if I carry this habit into a bigger application. Is there a better way to do it without changing anything from designer's side?
If I start to get too many layers of LinearLayouts I tend to switch to a RelativeLayout at the root and most of the children only 1 layer removed from root.
9-Patch resources are very helpful also. I suggest you start to make use of those more.
I've been playing about with the layout of a view with Android (lets say within the MainActivity) and I'm looking to create this sort of layout using 3 ImageView's (where each block represents an image):
This is rather easy to pull of using LinearLayout's but only if you specify the exact size and position of each ImageView. This then obviously causes problems when looking at different screen sizes.
Using AbsoluteLayout looked like it was going to work at first, but I've read that it's deprecated and it still causes problems with different screen sizes.
Then there is RelativeLayout, which I've tried using with DroidDraw, but it doesn't seem to get me very far when I implement it :(
So, does anyone have an ideas of how to achieve this?
EDIT: I've got close to doing this using dp instead of px but this still gets screwed up when using larger resolution devices! :(
Thanks
Romain Guy does something very similar using RelativeLayout. Android Layout Tricks #1
One solution is that you could use a TableLayout with 2 columns, and then in the second column embed a second TableLayout.
DroidDraw doesn't always show exactly how it will work when it runs 100% of the time I've noticed.
You can do this with a horizontal LinearLayout: add the green first, then add a vertical liner layout for the blue and orange and give each an appropriate weight (like 50 and 50).
You can still use LinearLayout but make the width/height in dip units. Thatvway it should look the same on any supported screen size. Alternativly, you could use the weight attribute instead which is probably a better idea for this case.