Showing technical resources tagged with User Interface:
Drawable Mutations
Drawables are pluggable drawing containers that allow applications to display graphics. This article explains some common pitfalls when trying to modify the properties of multiple Drawables.
Faster Screen Orientation Change
When an Android device changes its orientation, the default behavior is to automatically restart the current activity with a new configuration. However, this can become a bottleneck in applications that access a large amount of external data. This article discusses how to gracefully handle this situation without resorting to manually processing configuration changes.
Layout Tricks: Creating Reusable UI Components
Learn how to combine multiple standard UI widgets into a single high-level component, which can be reused throughout your application.
Layout Tricks: Creating Efficient Layouts
Learn how to optimize application layouts as this article walks you through converting a LinearLayout into a RelativeLayout, and analyzes the resulting implications on performance.
Layout Tricks: Using ViewStubs
Learn about using ViewStubs inside an application's layout in order to inflate rarely used UI elements, without the performance implications which would otherwise be caused by using the <include>
tag.
Layout Tricks: Merging Layouts
Learn how to use the <merge>
tag in your XML layouts in order to avoid unnecessary levels of hierarchy within an application's view tree.
ListView Backgrounds: An Optimization
ListViews are very popular widgets within the Android framework. This article describes some of the optimizations used by the ListView widget, and how to avoid some common issues that this causes when trying to use a custom background.
Live Folders
Live Folders allow users to display any source of data on their home screen without launching an application. This article discusses how to export an application's data in a format suitable for display inside of a live folder.
Live Wallpapers
Live wallpapers are richer, animated, interactive backgrounds that users can display in their home screens. Learn how to create a live wallpaper and bundle it in an application that users can install on their devices.
Quick Search Box
Quick Search Box (QSB) is a powerful, system-wide search framework. QSB makes it possible for users to quickly and easily find what they're looking for, both on their devices and on the web. This article discusses how to work with the QSB framework to add new search results for an installed application.
Speech Input
This articles describes the basics of integrating speech recognition into Android applications.
Touch Mode
This article explains the touch mode, one of the most important principles of Android's UI toolkit. Whenever a user interacts with a device's touch screen, the system enters touch mode. While simple in concept, there are important implications touch mode that are often overlooked.
Updating the UI from a Timer
Learn about how to use Handlers as a more efficient replacement for java.util.Timer on the Android platform.
Using Text-to-Speech
The text-to-speech API lets your application "speak" to users, in any of several languages. This article provides an overview of the TTS API and how you use to add speech capabilities to your application.
Using WebViews
WebViews allow an application to dynamically display HTML and execute JavaScript, without relinquishing control to a separate browser application. This article introduces the WebView classes and provides a sample application that demonstrates its use.
WikiNotes: Linkify your Text!
This article introduces WikiNotes for Android, part of the Apps for Android project. It covers the use of Linkify to turn ordinary text views into richer, link-oriented content that causes Android intents to fire when a link is selected.
Window Backgrounds & UI Speed
Some Android applications need to squeeze every bit of performance out of the UI toolkit and there are many ways to do so. In this article, you will discover how to speed up the drawing and the perceived startup time of your activities. Both of these techniques rely on a single feature, the window's background drawable.
Action Bar Compatibility new!
Shows how to use the action bar on both pre-API 11 and API 11+ devices, maximizing code re-use.
API Demos
A variety of small applications that demonstrate an extensive collection of framework topics.
API 4+ Support Demos
A variety of small applications that demonstrate the use of the helper classes in the Android API 4+ Support Library (classes which work down to API level 4 or version 1.6 of the platform).
API 13+ Support Demos
A variety of small applications that demonstrate the use of the helper classes in the Android API 13+ Support Library (classes which work down to API level 13 or version 3.2 of the platform).
Cube Live Wallpaper
An application that demonstrates how to create a live wallpaper and bundle it in an application that users can install on their devices.
Honeycomb Gallery
An image gallery application that demonstrates a variety of new APIs in Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). In addition to providing a tablet-optimized design, it also supports handsets running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and beyond, so is a good example of how to reuse Fragments to support different screen sizes.
Multiple Resolutions
A sample application that shows how to use resource directory qualifiers to provide different resources for different screen configurations.
Searchable Dictionary v2
A sample application that demonstrates Android's search framework, including how to provide search suggestions for Quick Search Box.
Snake
An implementation of the classic game "Snake."
Hello Views
A walk-through of the various types of layouts and views available in the Android SDK.
Hello Localization
The basics of localizing your applications for multiple languages and locales.