Text Shadows

Often tools like Photoshop are used to create graphic elements which are actually text with various effects applied to them, and an well used effect in such elements is the use of shadows. Android supports text shadows, and in this article we’ll explore a number of ways that we can use the built in shadows…

Supporting Multiple Displays – Part 2

In Supporting Multiple Displays – Part 1 we began looking at a layout which would work across a variety of screen sizes, aspect ratios, and densities. We covered some general rules about how best to achieve this, but in this article we’re going to examine the layout XML that we have used in the example…

Supporting Multiple Displays – Part 1

I often see questions asking how to create Android layouts which will work across a wide range of devices with different screen sizes and densities. There is no one single answer to this, there are a number of techniques that you can use. In this article we’ll look at some of these techniques. We have…

Layout Weights – Part 1

There is an often overlooked feature of layouts which is extremely powerful and allows us to get some pretty fine-grained control of the humble LinearLayout: Layout weights. We have briefly touched on layout weights in the Intelligent Layouts article, but we’ll cover them in a little more depth here.