Building Android UIs with Custom Views

Book excerpt: Create engaging user experiences and awesome user interfaces using this guide About This Book Move beyond default UI templates, create and customize amazing UIs with Android Custom View Enable smooth data flow and create futuristic UIs by creating flexible custom views Scale your apps with responsive and data intensive views Who This Book Is For This book is for Android developers who want to create great user interfaces and move beyond the basics of the standard UI elements. They must have basic Android development knowledge along with basic Java programming. What You Will Learn Extend the standard UI widget framework by creating Custom views Add complex rendering, animations, and interactions to your views Optimize performance and decrease battery usage Implement custom views to share between multiple projects, or share it publicly Create 3D custom views using OpenGL ES In Detail To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices. This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions. You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them. By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users. Style and approach The approach will be that of a step by step practical tutorial. The book will take you through a complete journey, right from creating your first Android view to customizing it to enable it to support any complex app.