I'm taking my first steps in Android programming.
My application is to create entries in a database. For this task I have created a new Activity. All is fine - but I don't really like how it looks.
Currently, the emulator shows this:
I'd like to have something similar to the "New Contact" Activity:
Buttons at the bottom of the window, not directly below the other controls (I'll hopefully figure that out myself)
Buttons within a nice "box" like shown in the screenshot (what's the control hosting the buttons here?)
When soft-keyboard is displayed, the buttons should "move up". If there's not enough room, the entire area should be scrollable (I'll try and figure that out myself too)
Sample can be seen here:
Which control hosts the buttons in the above "New contact" screenshot? I'd like to use the same for my buttons.
One way to figure out what an existing activity does is to use hierarchyviewer and examine the activity's contents.
Another way to figure out what a native Android activity does is to look at the source code. In this case, it would appear that the buttons are inside of a horizontal LinearLayout with style="#android:style/ButtonBar" to give the silver sheen. That style, in turn, uses #android:drawable/bottom_bar as its background. That image can be found in your SDK installation -- go to the platform directory of your choice, then data/res/drawable-hdpi and data/res/drawable-mdpi for the two versions.
The contacts layout looks like a ListView sitting on top of some sort of RelativeLayout or LinearLayout housing the buttons. The silver background may simply have been set using android:background on the Layout itself (layouts are views).
I found that the commonsware books are excellent resources for getting started and have good examples for this type of layout.
Hey, this is a little late, and I know you've already got the silver bar you wanted, which is all good, but I've stumbled upon a really good guide on controlling the soft keyboard for best user experience. It covers, among other things, how to make the visible area resize to fit the button bar in the view while typing, which is done by specifying the activity in the manifest file like so:
<activity android:name=".MyActivity" android:windowSoftInputMode="resize" />
I really recommend reading it, it covers a lot more helpful stuff than just that. Hope that helps; I couldn't see that anyone else has answered that particular part of your question.
You can put them in LinearLayout and assign weight of 1 to each of the buttons.
Also if you own dev phone / or want to see UI of the application in emulator - there is a very cool tool call hierarchyviewer
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/hierarchy-viewer.html
and you can see how UI of app you like has been laydown.
Related
I'm trying to design an app with a layout that will roughly look like this (don't mind the color):
How can I achieve something like that? I'm thinking of using a CardView for that bottom panel (I don't know what it's really called).
Furthermore, I want to hide it (animating it) when the use scrolls on the content. I have tried many codes but they won't work so I won't put them here anyway (like what's suggested here). Thanks for the help.
Whenever I have a question along the lines of "How do I do this neat UI thing I saw once?", I always start by checking out wasabeef's amazing UI library collection. In your case I might start by looking at bottomsheet or AndroidSweetSheet.
At the top there is the favorites/styles/all channels
i don't know what that widget/control is i need to know what it is
i am certain i saw it before i just can't seem to find it again.
then there is a listview which is easy to implement no help needed there
then the same control again, i need to know how to build it.
it looks like a native Android control, i know how i can make one just like it using image buttons but i am sure i am missing something.
P.S. this is an image from sky.fm app on android
EDIT: I Do no need help with the ListView i already did that
What i do need help with is how to make the "favorites/styles/all channels" buttons if there is a way to do natively.
If there isn't a way to do natively, and you are sure just say there isn't a way to do natively ( that would be a good answer )
the perfect answer would be a working code, but i am not lazy i am already implementing the code my self
There's no native control for this. It's probably a Button or maybe ToggleButton. You could create a background xml with different states for selected true or false. And when you click the button toggle the selected state.
Top might be a custom tab layout, or just a bunch of buttons with custom styling.
Main part looks like a listview with complex row views.
Bottom almost definately is a bunch of buttons.
You can implement it using ClickableListAdapter.There is also tab implementation.try it.
Just make it using image buttons and put filters in your ListView, or create your own filter form scratch !
After seeing the last screenshots of new foursquare application and their balloon like cartoon instructions, I'd like to create some of these in my application.
I found a similar question for iPhone
Small popup for instructions... How?
Here is another screenshot of foursquare app:
I'd like to know how I could achieve that with Android.
Thanks in advance for any help.
UPDATE: This is what I could get so far but adding some buttons with a custom drawn background and layering them with a FrameLayout:
But I still couldn't get the triangle effect. Maybe there is something I can do with my custom background shape?
UPDATE2
After checking your suggestions, I decided to go with Aaron C idea and added an image with an arrow on it. This is my current result:
Thank you Snailer, QuickAction API project seems very much promissing. I'll check it out when implementing more features in my app.
Now, I just need to get the right color or maybe I could just let it this way. It seems nice too.
And, so, to summarize what I did:
Got my initial xml layout inside a FrameView.
As I'm using a frameview, everything I put in here will be piled one over the other. That's how I could add things to the layout.
In that framelayout, I put 2 relativelayouts whith an image with the triangle and a button to create the two upper popups. In the bottom I put a button only.
That's it. I hope it helps somebody.
Thank you very much again for all your help!
That sounds like a neat thing to implement. There might be a built-in Android variation on AlertDialog that achieves this, but if not here is how I would go about implementing it:
Create a new Activity whose background is black with a very high (low?) alpha color value. This will allow you to see through it to the previous Activity in the stack. Then, add your alert at whatever coordinates you like using a relative layout with padding values.
You might also want to add a touch listener that exits the Activity if the user touches the balloon (or maybe anywhere in the screen).
If you want to be fancy with coordinate placement of the balloon, you can pass this information into the new Activity using the Activity's launch Intent with the putExtra() methods.
It's probably achieved through skinning a toast.
The developer documentation shows a skinned toast in "Creating a custom toast view" at http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toasts.html
You may want to look at the QuickAction API. It acheives this by using PopupWindow, skinned, positioned, and animated.
I've recently started developing Android Apps, and whilst the model is making more sense the more I look at it, I cannot do something (nor find any reference material on it) which to me seems quite simple.
I have an activity which has five buttons along the bottom, and a blank View taking up the rest of the screen. I want, upon clicking these buttons, for an activity to be opened in (and confined to) this view. I can get a new activity running without incident, but this opens in a new screen.
If anyone can show me an easy way to launch a (sub/child?) activity within a view which is defined in the parent activity's layout xml file - equally, it could be created in the parent activity - you'd really be doing me a favor!
I'd recommend taking a look at TabHost. The tabhost is an Activity itself, and the sub-views are all Actvities as well.
Here is a good tutorial that'll get you going very quickly. There is a more work to create (optional) icons for the tabs (also describe in the tutorial).
Hope this helps.
Edit* You mentioned buttons being at the bottom of the screen. Take a look at this SO Question
You can achieve that by using an ActivityGroup... here is a simple example which shows how to do it using a TabActivity:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100816175634/http://blog.henriklarsentoft.com/2010/07/android-tabactivity-nested-activities/
Of course, you will have to change the code since you are not using TabActivities. Just take a look at the getLocalActivityManager and getDecorView methods that is what you will be using.
I am currently working on an Android app, I have completed all the 'hard stuff', such as getting my database working, and so on. Now I need to make the UI look decent.
I would like to make something that has a 'frame' layout that is clickable. You would click on a 'frame' to find out more information, a bit like the Amazon app.
If anyone has any ideas, tutorials or good links, I would be very grateful.
Thanks in advance.
Take a look at Gallery. It's built in to Android and does what I think you're looking for (at least, it describes the Amazon app's UI; since FrameLayout has a very explicit meaning in Android that is not at all what you're talking about, I ignored that part).
EDIT: A screenshot would have been helpful but I think you're actually talking about a simple list-like view.
Oh. That's either a ListView, or more likely just a vertical LinearLayout inside a ScrollView. I can tell you what I'd do: Each item in the LinearLayout would have a background set, with a width of match_parent and a height of wrap_content, using a 9patch with the right-pointing arrow inside it. I'd also define an identical but blue-highlighted version of the image for the pressed state and use a state drawable XML to let it know which to use. Then I'd just bind an onClick listener for each item I wanted to fire off a click action on.