Colours

Note: I will use the UK and US spellings of colour / color interchangeably in this article because in some places the syntax and naming conventions dictate the US spelling. Where necessary, I shall use the spelling required by Android for it to work and highlight where spelling is important. Up until now, we have…

State List Drawables

In the last article we covered the styling of a dialog box using vector drawables. In this article we are going to add a cancel button to that dialog box, and style the button. Styling widgets is a little more complex that the static styling that we’ve previously covered because widgets change state depending on…

Shape Drawables – part 3

In part 2 we got our basic dialog box look and feel working, but still had some tidying up to do. The first things that we need to do it to make the dialog box title look a bit more like a dialog box title. We need to define a new drawable for the background…

Shape Drawables – part 2

In part 1 we set up a basic dialog box project, but it was badly in need of some styling and it didn’t bear much resemblance to a dialog box. Let’s begin part 2 by making this actually appear in a centralised dialog-style window. To do this, we need to begin defining the “dialog” style…

Shape Drawables – part 1

One of the building blocks of styling and themeing Android apps is understanding drawables. Drawables are graphic elements that come in two distinct types: Bitmap Drawables – these are bitmap files such as PNG which are rendered as images by the OS. They can also be 9-patch bitmaps which enable the OS to anamorphically distort…