Pro Android UI

If you’re an Android application developer, chances are you’re using fixed, scrolling, swipe-able, and other cutting-edge custom UI Designs in your Android development projects. These UI Design approaches as well as other Android ViewGroup UI layout containers are the bread and butter of Pro Android User Interface (UI) design and Android User Experience (UX) design and development.

Using a top down approach, Pro Android UI shows you how to design and develop the best user interface for your app, while taking into account the varying device form factors in the increasingly fragmented Android environment. Pro Android UI aims to be the ultimate reference and customization cookbook for your Android UI Design, and as such will be useful to experienced developers as well as beginners.

With Android’s powerful UI layout classes, you can easily create everything from the simplest of lists to fully tricked-out user interfaces. While using these UI classes for boring, standard user interfaces can be quite simple, customizing a unique UI design can often become extremely challenging.

What you’ll learn

• How to design and develop a sleek looking and highly functional user interface (UI) design and experience (UX) design using Android APIs
• What Android layout containers are, and how to best leverage them
• How to design user-friendly UI layouts that conform to Android UI guidelines
• What, when, why and how to use fundamental Android UI layout containers (ViewGroup subclasses) and Android UI widgets (View subclasses)
• How to use new media assets such as images, video, and animation in a UI
• How to create UI Fragments for UI design for specific ActionBar or Activity classes that you wish to create for UI designs within your applications
• Scaling UI Design for the various Android smartphone and tablet form factors

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced Android app developers.  It can also be for app developers and UI designers working on other platforms like iOS and BlackBerry who might also be interested in Android.

Table of Contents

Part I. Introduction to the Core Classes for Android UI Design: Development Tools, Layout Containers and Widgets
Chapter 1. Android UI Design Tools: Setting Up Your Android Development System
Chapter 2. Android UI Layouts: Layout Containers and the ViewGroup Class
Chapter 3. Android UI Widgets: User Interface Widgets and the View Class

Part II. Introduction to Android Menu Class for UI Design: OptionsMenu, ContextMenu, PopupMenu and ActionBar
Chapter 4. Android UI Options Menus: OptionsMenu Class and an Introduction to the Android ActionBar
Chapter 5. Android UI Local Menus: The ContextMenu Class and PopupMenu Class
Chapter 6. Android UI Action Bar: Advanced ActionBar Design & ActionBar Class

Part III. Android UI: Layout Considerations, Concepts & UI Containers: LinearLayout, RelativeLayout, FrameLayout
Chapter 7. Android UI Design Considerations: Styles, Screen Density Targets and New Media Formats
Chapter 8. Android UI Design Concepts: Wire-framing & UI Layout Design Patterns
Chapter 9. Android UI Layout Conventions, Differences and Approaches
Chapter 10. Android UI Theme Design & Digital Media Concepts

Part IV. Basic Android UI Design: Basic Layout Containers: FrameLayout, LinearLayout, RelativeLayout, GridLayout
Chapter 11. Android’s FrameLayout Class: Using Digital Video in your UI Design
Chapter 12. Android’s LinearLayout Class: Horizontal and Vertical UI Design
Chapter 13. Android’s RelativeLayout Class: Complex UI Design Via a Single Layout Container
Chapter 14. Android’s GridLayout Class: Optimized UI Design using a Grid-based Layout

Part V. Advanced Android UI Design: Advanced Layout Containers: DrawerLayout, SlidingPane, ViewPager, Strips
Chapter 15. Android DrawerLayout Class: Using Left and Right Side UI Drawer Design
Chapter 16. Android SlidingPaneLayout Class: Optimized UI Design using a Grid-based Layout Container
Chapter 17. Android ViewPager Class: Using View Paging to Navigate Complex View Hierarchies
Chapter 18. Android PagerTabStrip and PagerTitleStrip Classes: Design Navigation UI Elements for the ViewPager Layout