Percent – Part 1

In August 2015 Google published a new support library along with the Marshmallow Developer Preview 3 named Percent which provides an alternative to using weights in LinearLayout to divide space within your layouts. In this short series we’ll take a look at this new library, explore how to implement it, and also look at some…

Dirty Phrasebook – Part 3

On 1st April 2015 I published a joke app to Google Play named Dirty Phrasebook which is based upon Monty Python’s Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook sketch. I this series of articles we’ll take a look in to the code (which will be open-sourced along with the final article). In this article we’ll turn our attention to…

Layout Types Part 4: FrameLayout

In the previous articles in this series we have looked at LinearLayout, TableLayout, and RelativeLayout. In this concluding part, we’ll look at FrameLayout, which is arguable the simplest of the basic layout types, but can be extremely useful.

Layout Types Part 1: LinearLayout

Android Layouts are extremely powerful. In the article on Supporting Multiple Displays we looked at how we can use Layouts to allow Android to take a certain amount of responsibility for fitting things to the display. However, Android supports a number of different types of Layout and, while we may have a clear idea of…

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.

Intelligent Layouts

I recently read an article bemoaning the fact that Android apps look inferior to their iPhone counterparts even when both apps are produced by the same company. You can read the original article here. While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the points raised, the purpose of this blog is to help improve the…