Android UI Fundamentals

Book excerpt: Author Jason Ostrander walks developers through the different choices available on their way to creating a well-designed application for Android. While building a simple application, Jason works through the basics of Android UI development including layout, event handling, menus and notifications. The author then shows the proper way to load and display images, create advanced dialogs and progress indicators, add animation, and how to build custom UI elements. Jason discusses the proper way of adding interaction through gestures and the advanced graphical options available using Canvas, Renderscript and OpenGL. Finally, he discusses tablet development, the unique differences between phone and tablet UI, and the new APIs available to tablet developers.