Professional Android 4 Application Development

4Building User Interfaces
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
‰ Using Views and layouts
‰ Understanding Fragments
‰ Optimizing layouts
‰ Creating resolution-independent user interfaces
‰ Extending, grouping, creating, and using Views
‰ Using Adapters to bind data to Views
To quote Stephen Fry on the role of style as part of substance in the design of digital devices:
As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called
stylish that does not function superbly…. Yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it
matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.
—STEPHEN FRY, THE GUARDIAN (OCTOBER 27, 2007)
Although Fry was describing the style of the devices themselves, the same can be said of the
applications that run on them. Bigger, brighter, and higher resolution displays with multitouch
support have made applications increasingly visual. The introduction of devices optimized for
a more immersive experience — including tablets and televisions — into the Android ecosystem
has only served to increase the importance of an application’s visual design.
In this chapter you’ll discover the Android components used to create UIs. You’ll learn how to
use layouts, Fragments, and Views to create functional and intuitive UIs for your Activities.
The individual elements of an Android UI are arranged on screen by means of a variety of
Layout Managers derived from the ViewGroup class. This chapter introduces several native