The Trouble With ClickableSpan

Regular readers of Styling Android will know that I like Spans. A lot. They are an incredibly versatile way of formatting text. However, there is one type of Span which can be problematic: ClickableSpan. The problem isn’t so much with ClickableSpan itself, which does exactly what it is designed to do, but the need to…

Superscript

Although the number of typos which appear in my blog posts may suggest otherwise, I am quite keen on good grammar. One specific area of this, which is nice to get right, is the display of ordinal numbers in their abbreviated form. In plain English, this means that when we shorten the word ‘first’ to…

TextInputLayout

One component of the Design Support Library that we didn’t cover in the earlier series on that library was the new TextInputLayout which adds some nice additions to a standard EditText control to provide improved hint and error text handling. In this article we’ll look at how to use it, and avoid the one gotcha…

Dirty Phrasebook – Part 5

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 continue looking at the…

Dirty Phrasebook – Part 4

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. In 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 look at the custom…

Dirty Phrasebook – Part 2

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 look at the remainder…

Dirty Phrasebook – Part 1

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 the first article we’ll begin to look…

Custom Colour Spans

Regular readers of Styling Android should know that I’m a huge fan of Spans and believe that a good understanding of Spans is essential in order to get the best out of TextView. That said sometimes just doing simple things, such as simply changing the text colour, can seem a little awkward. In this article…

App UI / UX – Part 2

In the previous article we began improving the UI of the app we developed as part of the Bluetooth LE series. We updated the layout to something slightly more interesting, but there is still more work to do. In this article we’ll look at how to use custom typefaces within our app.