How big is the smallest motorola android's screen, in pixels? I want to know what size I need to make my graphic without it being too distorted by the fill_parent.
Although this doesn't directly answer your question..
Android is the name of the operating system running on Android phones. Different phone models could have different resolutions and pixel densities. Therefore you have to be careful not to hardcode resolution values into your code. It might run well on one phone but poorly on another.
Check out these pages for details about supporting different screens:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.html
It would be unwise to program for one screen size, especially if you plan on distributing your application later. You should design your application for as many screen sizes as possible.
Instead use nine-patch images and flexible layouts.
If you are designing an icon, the look at the android icon design guidelines and consider high, medium and low density screens. There are different resource folders for these too and android takes care of selecting the appropriate one for the current device.
motorola droid's display size is 480x854 px, according to specs, so it's rather non-standard
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I'm required to design an apps for android.
And after some reading, I find out android device are divided into few categories in term of resolution, like
small screen
normal screen
large screen
extra large screen
but in different density.
So lets say, now I need to come out a design for normal screen, what resolution that I should use for the "look & feel" of the apps UI.
From the reading, I know android apps are use dp instead of px. So, is it means I have to convert few specific screen size to dp before I start to design ?
Or I just simply target a common resolution for normal screen size like 320x480, provided I will have few set drawable in different density ?
Please correct me if I had mistaken it.
Thank you
Good question, so far we have 5 screen densities :
xxhdpi,xhdpi,hdpi,mdpi,ldpi , now if you have an image resource you will need to create 5 copies of it, its always recommended to start by the xxhdpi till you reach to the smallest,
however you can use online calculators that will calculate the PX and DP for all the densities, i recommend these two tools android developer toolbox and developers tools, and with developers tools you can test the colors, and how are they going to look like in the screen in HEX decimal.
Yes it is true android has following types of devices
LDPI
MDPI
HDPI
XHDPI
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
this link gives you all the description
and ya you have to create icons and images supporting to all the devices resolution wise.
There are various devices with various screen sizes.
Usually, they are mentioned as LDPI, MDPI, HDPI or XHDPI devices.
Although, in coding there are many things to be kept in mind so that you achieve a good uniform design in all your devices !
Refer to this link. It is always good to follow official sites, rather than other tutorials out there. Make a habit of using relativelayout !
Also in the link you can explore many things to get the knowledge of designing in Android.
I am a bit confused in designing the layout for my app.
My main problem is that whatever I am designing should not look too small or get clipped.
What screen resolution to choose in psd for 480x800
For this purpose exacly they created this page. The problem here is not only the devices resolutions, but also those here:
Supporting Different Screen Sizes
Supporting Different Densities
You will also have to take a look here and here.
Designing an App is not a simple matter if you would like it to look "the same" on different devices, those are devises with different screen sizes and/or densities.
EDIT:
You may also like to take a look at this like here, which explains, as stated on the title "Understanding Density Independence in Android".
Cheers
I developed and application and uploaded all the images in the respective drawable folders (different pixels for different desnities).
Now I am confused when it comes to layout. If I used the layout editor with 4.1 inc (thats considered Med screen I guess?) everything looks great.
Now when I use the editor with 10.1 inch which is the tablet, then I see icons very small and the text is small. I have not run the emulator yet.
So I am wondering:
1- why would the text be small although I didn't specify text size? Shouldnt scalle appropriately? or should I give it a specific size for bigger layouts?
2- Why the icons are small given that I provided the different drawables? I thought it would scale up accordingly.
Please don't give me the supporting multiple screens link in android as an answer, as I already went through it and still no luck with above. I need your personal advice as I think I am missing something here
Thank you so much in advance
Android support for different screens is a little tricky. That's because you can have large, small, medium and xlarge screens, plus high, medium and low density ones. There are a dozen possibilities (xlarge low density, small high density) and not a single resolution is defined. So you must know the principles which the API is designed upon and must define your layout thinking about the role the widget has inside your UI. You also must bear in mind that your layout won't be pixel perfect on 100% of devices, so your aim should be being usable on all possible devices.
In your specific case it seems that either you don't manage to specify the correct resources, or the system doesn't pick up the right ones for you, but I must remark that it doesn't make sense on Android to talk about big, small and scale: you should design your layout with a (good) webdeveloper mindset, who daily deals with tons of different displays, resolutions, physical sizes and even devices.
I also suggest not using the graphical builder if you are new to Android, because you really need to know how Android lays out components, otherwise you will come back to SO very often :)
If you do not specify the text size in your layout file Android will take the default value, which is most likely in DIP (density independent pixel) therefore it will be the same physical size on any devices. That should explain why the text looks so small on your 10 inch tablet.
What I would do in this case is have 3 layouts for each activities and specify the text size for larger devices (given you already like the look on phones) and put them in this folder scheme :
res/layout/layout.xml // phones
res/layout-sw600dp/layout.xml // 7” tablets
res/layout-sw720dp/layout.xml // 10” tablets
Information above was taken in this article. I have this applied in my current personal project and so far it works like a charm.
Secondly, as far as icons go, I'm no drawable expert but if you provided the same file in each folder (like I think you did from what I understand in your question), it will not make it scale. You'll have to create 4 difference icons, one for each possible pixel density.
Information about icon sizes can be found on this page.
Hope this is of some help to you.
My experience with the Android device zoo drew me to the sad conclusion that the built-in screen size/layout facility is useless. Cases in point, straight from support:
a 10 inch tablet with Android 2.2. Screen size xlarge is not supported by Android 2.2
Kindle Fire, which is 7 inch and claims it's xlarge.
I ended up putting all three layouts (med/large/xlarge) into layout, loading one based on run-time density and resolution, and providing an option for user to force a specific layout.
Just sayin'.
Are there any tools out there that can convert my dpi units for a baseline densitity into another?
When I define my layout-files I design for a screen with 320x480 dpi units. But then it doesn't fit right on small and large devices.
But since we know the baseline dpi's of ldpi, mdpi, hdpi and xhdpi, why isn't there a tool to just take my width/height definitions in the files and scale them to these different densities, given a default baseline. It should then return the missing layout files, where they would scale right on to these other densities.
It seems straight forward and would save developers tons of time, does anyone know of an existing program to do this?
I created a tool that allows you to scale/adjust your layouts for tablets and small screen devices and made a blog post about it here: http://onemanmobile.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-scale-your-android-layouts-to.html
Basically, defining your layouts in dp units is not enough if you want your app to fit on all devices and tablets, since there's four different "density-buckets". This tool will allow your layouts to be converted into fitting these density buckets.
I hope the blog, tool and answer will help others, I know it felt good to have my app work perfectly on a tablet with the press of a button.
Your question doesn't make any sense. what you're asking for is exactly what Android does.
If you put an image into a folder (like xhdpi) it is automatically scaled for all different device densities.
If you create a layout for a particular class of device, then the correct layout is used for the correct device.
I would advise against designing for specific resolutions of screen - there are too many. Group screens into buckets - e.g. "Phones" and "Tablets", or "Small Phones", "Phones", "Large Screen Devices" - specify criteria, and build layouts for each category. It's a fool's game to build layouts for every screen resolution, there are hundreds of Android devices.
The designer of our company wants me to give him the resolutions of Android tablets so he will start designing a new app.
I know there are a lot of different resolutions (listed here: Android Tablets computers).
I also know about the division of Android to the different dpi's (ldpi, mdpi, ...).
My questions :
What should I tell the designer? He obviously not supposed to make a version for each resolution. Besides, some of the resolutions listed in the link above are in the same dpi, so which one should I choose?
Considering the fact the app is going to run only on tablets, what are the dpi classes I should use? Only hdpi and xhdpi? Or should I still use all 4 classes and limit the <supports-screens> tag in the manifest?
Is there a resolution that represent each of the dpi classes that I
should stick to?
I've done some reading about 9-patch. What's the point of using it if I still need to deliver a version for each dpi??
Thanks in advance!
The questions contain so much information.
1 Try to read the article and the references in it.
http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2011/11/design-patterns-for-responsive-android.html
You could also have a look at the web site for android design.
http://developer.android.com/design/index.html
In one word, designing for android tablets is more like designing websites. You cannot just design for one resolution.
2 Considering you are developing for tablets, it's necessary to support mdpi and hdpi. If the apps could be installed on phones, maybe xhdpi is also needed. It's not very strict.
3 dpi(dots per inch) = pixels per inch. So dpi is like density, it do not have strict relationship with resolution. But there is still a sheet could help you, try to find it in the following page
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
4 9-patch resource is very useful. With which a small png could stretch to any size without distortion. And it could also help to reduce the size of your resources.
In most situation, you do not have to make 9-patch for each dpi, since it could stretch to any size you want. But if the 9-patch png contain some information itself, like min height and padding, it's necessary to make different versions.
Here is what I would do:
See what combinations you have. There are mostly 3 resolutions for tablets (1280x800, 1024x600, 800x480) and mostly 2 densities (hdpi and mdpi). That is at most 6 versions. Select a few matching your most logical targets (I would choose xlarge mdpi (9" 1280x800), large mdpi (7" 1024x600) and normal-hdpi (4-5" 800x480) and design on these.
Some graphical elements don't need to be designed for each combinations, like backgrounds, may be buttons… Here comes the 9-patch. To be put in drawable-nodpi folder. One resource fits all.
Do one version first on you major target, then see how it fits on the other targets, and consider adjustments from there.
Use ScrollViews if you don't want to position every item pixel-perfectly on each device.