Styling Android

As I am writing this it is Google I/O week 2013. Amongst the new releases this week is a new version of the v4 support library (release 13) which contains support for the Navigation Drawer pattern. This pattern steadily grown in popularity, but until this point there has been no official support and guidelines from Google. This has now changed, and there are official design guidelines. In the recent series on Adapters we created an app which used Spinner navigation in the ActionBar to switch between different examples. In this short series we’ll convert this to use the Navigation Drawer pattern instead.
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Back in November 2011 I posted a two part series to Styling Android which covered GridLayout which was introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich (API 14). In those articles, I have mentioned that there were hints from Google’s Dianne Hackbourn that it would be released as a compatibility library project, and it has been. However, there are some tweaks required to get it working with the code from the previous articles, so in this article we’ll look at how to convert the code from the earlier articles to use the compatibility library implementation of GridLayout.
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In the previous article we looked at using different controls in our ActionBar to provide custom behaviour. That’s all well and good, but suppose we actually want to do something a little more complex? In this article we’ll have a look at how we can use custom layouts within our ActionBar.
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I recently learned about a small feature in Android which has been there since API level 1 (the variant that we’ll use has been in there since API 3, but others appeared in API 1): Compound Drawables. In this article we’ll have a look at what they are and see how we can use them to simplify some of our layouts.
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In previous articles in this series we have looked at the app that I used for my presentation at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. In this concluding part we’ll have a look at some of the animations that were used throughout the presentation.
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Previously in this series we have looked at the custom controls that are used in the app that I used for my presentation at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. Now that we’ve got a lot of the dry code out of the way, we can begin to explore the slide layouts to see how we combine those controls in to some nice slides in our presentation.
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Previously in this series we’ve dissected the app that I used for my presentation at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. In this part we’ll look at the final custom control. In order to understand what’s going on, you really need to have read the previous articles in this series as some of the concepts (such as slide phases) are specific to this application. In the previous article we introduced the concept of a View which can change state depending on the phase of its parent SlideLayout by means of the Phaseable interface. In this part we’ll look at a Phaseable implementation – specifically a TextView upon which we can change the visibility depending on the current view phase of the parent SlideLayout.
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Previously in this series we’ve looked at the app that I used for my presentation at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. In this part we’ll have a look at the custom controls used to manage the individual slides
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In Part 1 of this series we began our look at the code for the app that I used for my presentation on Android layouts at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. Previously we had begun our look at a custom layout named DisplayLayout which is the layout which holds the slides in the presentation. We’ll continue with a look at this class.
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On 26th November 2011 I presented a keynote at AndroidConf Brasil about Android layouts. For my presentation, I used a custom Android application running on a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 Tablet instead of the more traditional Powerpoint / KeyNote approach. Instead of publishing my slides following my presentation, I am publishing a “lite” version of this and, in a break from the normal format of this blog, in this series of articles I am going to explain some of the key aspects of the app. Having said that, the lite version is almost entirely UI, so should be of interest to regular readers.
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