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…

Supporting Multiple Displays – Part 2

In Supporting Multiple Displays – Part 1 we began looking at a layout which would work across a variety of screen sizes, aspect ratios, and densities. We covered some general rules about how best to achieve this, but in this article we’re going to examine the layout XML that we have used in the example…

Supporting Multiple Displays – Part 1

I often see questions asking how to create Android layouts which will work across a wide range of devices with different screen sizes and densities. There is no one single answer to this, there are a number of techniques that you can use. In this article we’ll look at some of these techniques. We have…

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…