VerticalText – Part 1

Recently I was working on a project where I had free reign over the UI, and felt that it would be very nice to have some vertically oriented text. On searching through the Android API docs, I found that rotating Views isn’t supported directly, but a quick Google search found a number of approaches. In…

Compound Drawables

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…

Data Backup – Part 2

In the first article in this series we had a first look at Android Data Backup. We got a simple app working which successfully stored its SharedPreferences in the cloud and restored them we the app was re-installed. Thee was one problem, however: If we manually triggered a restore of the SharedPreferences, we did not…

Data Backup – Part 1

Normally on Styling Android I try and stick to UI / UX tips and techniques, but in this series of articles I’m going to cover a topic that is not directly UI / UX specific yet, if implemented, can delight your users: using Android Data Backup to backup and restore app settings / config to…