Technical Resources

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Showing technical resources tagged with User Interface:

Drawable Mutations

Article about Canvas Drawing and User Interface

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

Article about Best Practices and User Interface

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

Article about User Interface and Layouts/Views

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

Article about Layouts/Views, User Interface, Performance and Best Practices

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

Article about Layouts/Views, User Interface, Performance and Best Practices

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

Article about Layouts/Views, User Interface, Performance and Best Practices

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

Article about User Interface and Performance

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

Article about User Interface

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

Article about User Interface

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

Article about User Interface and Search

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

Article about Input Methods, Search and User Interface

This articles describes the basics of integrating speech recognition into Android applications.

Touch Mode

Article about User Interface

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

Article about User Interface and Best Practices

Learn about how to use Handlers as a more efficient replacement for java.util.Timer on the Android platform.

Using Text-to-Speech

Article about User Interface and Accessibility

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

Article about User Interface and Web Content

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!

Article about User Interface

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

Article about User Interface and Performance

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!

Sample for User Interface, Compatibility and New Features

Shows how to use the action bar on both pre-API 11 and API 11+ devices, maximizing code re-use.

API Demos

Sample for Layouts/Views and User Interface

A variety of small applications that demonstrate an extensive collection of framework topics.

API 4+ Support Demos

Sample for Layouts/Views and User Interface

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

Sample for Layouts/Views and User Interface

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

Sample for User Interface

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

Sample for New Features and User Interface

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

Sample for User Interface, Best Practices and Layouts/Views

A sample application that shows how to use resource directory qualifiers to provide different resources for different screen configurations.

Snake

Sample for Layouts/Views and User Interface

An implementation of the classic game "Snake."

Wiktionary

Sample for User Interface and App Widgets

An example of creating interactive widgets for display on the Android home screen.

Wiktionary (Simplified)

Sample for User Interface and App Widgets

A simple Android home screen widgets example.

Hello Views

Tutorial on User Interface and Layouts/Views

A walk-through of the various types of layouts and views available in the Android SDK.

Hello Localization

Tutorial on User Interface and Best Practices

The basics of localizing your applications for multiple languages and locales.

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