Styling Android

In the previous article we installed Maven and some Android related tools, and got an existing project converted to a Maven build. We had an error because despite all of the tools we installed, Maven itself does not know how to build Android apps. In this article we’ll fix the build and begin to get an understanding of how Maven works and what benefits it offers us.
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Apache Maven is a build automation tool which does an awful lot more besides. I have used Maven for a number of years for server-side projects and think that it is a fantastic tool. I have tried it on a number of occasions for automating Android builds but always either hit problems, or just found the Android tools were lacking some of the features that I required and was forced to give up. It was also quite painful to get installed and working correctly. A couple of months ago, I tried it once again and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Android tools for Maven finally seem to have matured. In this series we’ll look at how to get Maven set up for Eclipse and ADT, and explore some of the cool things that Maven can do for us.
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In the previous article in this series we have looked at some techniques for using transparency as a means to keep our text clearly visible. In this article we’re going to move away from text and look at some other neat things that we can do with transparency.
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In the previous article we looked at the GridLayout label pattern and explored how it is designed to keep the label text visible irrespective of the background. In this article we’ll look at this concept further.
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In the previous article in this series we looked at some dry examples which demonstrated some important aspects of using transparency in our UI. In this article we shall have a look at some real-world examples of how we can use transparency.
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