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 2
In the previous article we looked at using layout_weight to give us some nice control over how we layout children within a parent layout. In this article we’ll cover some more aspects of layout_weights.
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.
Alert Dialog – Part 2
In the last article we began styling an AlertDialog, but ran in to problems because Android does not apply text styles to AlertDialogs. In this article we’ll explore how we can overcome this problem.
Alert Dialog – Part 1
Recently there was a comment on the article Shape Drawables – part 3 asking if is possible to style an AlertDialog, rather than on an Activity, as is covered in that article. The simple answer is yes. However, it is not without it’s problems as we’ll see later.
Custom Controls – Part 3
In the previous article we continued the creation of a custom control and extended it to enable us to configure it via the XML layout rather than only programatically. In this article we’ll cover extending the control further so that we can properly style and theme it.
Custom Controls – Part 2
In the previous article we created a custom control which applies highlights to our text based upon a regular expression. We got this working so that we could control it programatically. In this article we’ll look at how to control things from the XML layout.
Custom Controls – Part 1
In a recent article we looked at how to apply themes to Android apps. In order to further explore how themes work, it is necessary to try to understand precisely how styles and themes are applied to controls. To this end, we will look at building a simple custom control, and then learn how to…
Introduction to Spans
In this article we are going to look at a useful mechanism for applying styles to sections of text. While it is easy enough to style blocks of text using standard Android styles, there is also a mechanism for applying styles to text at a sub-block level. In HTML it is possible to add emphasis…
Themes
If you have read the other articles in this series, then you should be getting quite familiar with applying styles to layouts and widgets, and we can get some pretty good results by combining the techniques that we’ve learned so far. While it is certainly possible to apply a, for example, button style to every…