On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 12:17 PM, rmz76 <[email protected]> wrote: > ... I hate the way UI is handled. Perhaps I will love it once I get my head > around it, but as of now, I really prefer the way iOS development handles > this. My background is predominately Web so I'm no stranger to mockup > languages. In general with the Android SDK I found everything to be well > documented and to just "makes sense" until I got to the XML driven layout > aspect of Android. I understand everything is a View. That concept is easy to > grasp, but what's difficult is to find a really good reference for all my > available controls with contextual (and visual) examples of their use. There > are sites that demonstrate use patterns but these are missing code samples. > This puts the the developer in a situation where they go on a goose chase. > Don't tell me they are built into the visual design tool for Eclipse, it's > crap and I refuse to use it. A reference should exist outside the visual > editor and that's what I'm looking for. Also do not point me to the general > SDK API documentation for views. I don't want to sort through hundreds of > classes trying to extract TextView, Button, etc (what an incredible time sink > that is). My process has been working like this. > > 1. See interesting UI pattern implemented in popular apps: x and y > > 2. Go to Internet trying to track down possible Android UI components to > implement feature seen in apps x,y > > 3. Try to find source examples of implementing controls I am inferring are > being used (this is usually a try and repeat cycle taking hours) > > 4. After much trial, frustration and anger finally retreat to something else. > > I'll give an example of such a feature: Horizontal view swiping. From the > official Android Play store to the CNN App, this is probably the most common > navigation we're seeing for dealing with menus on Android. It's beautiful, > it's also a pain in ass to implement. After much searching I found an article > on this on the official site > > http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/08/horizontal-view-swiping-with-viewpager.html > > I can open the source example and understand what's going on but my question > is why does it take pages and pages of foundation code to implement something > that should be core? IMO this is where Android development is much more > complex than it needs to be and frankly it's where the weak point is. Yes, we > need the power of doing things at the lower level like this, but we need a > nice abstraction layer on top do knock these things out quickly as well. If > you've done iOS development you know what I mean. > > View transitions are another good example. Let's say I want my view to fade > in or out or that I want it to rotate in 3D (just do a simple flip or slide > in and out). I don't understand why the developer has to go so low level to > accomplish these sort of task. I'm hoping perhaps I missed something and that > there are wrappers for common transforms, etc... > > Overall I'm just very frustrated with what the Android SDK offers to the UI > developer. It seems some more abstraction for common patterns should be baked > in and it's not. > > To bring this around so that my first post to this group is not just a rant, > I'd looking for community recommendations for a masters course/book on > Android UI. I want to know the best source you've found on programming > Android UI. I don't have weeks to spend "just tinkering with it" trying to > get my head around the common patterns. > > Is Google doing anything to help? > > Thanks, > RMZ >
This is a good run down of the state of things with Android UI. I don't generally work on any UI-y things on Android at all, but I will say that to be honest, the best thing you can do is go through the documentation definitively and learn what all possibilities are out there. There are a large amount of open source android apps, but more elaborate UI designs are typically baked from low level roots. When it comes to precise layout, I'd wager to say that most of the more senior developers on this list use simply XML along with dynamically building their UI. Refusing to hunt through the SDK is sort of ill founded. If you plan on doing this for a while, it's stupid not to flip through the set of classes or hierarchy, it's not like there are 10,000 view instances, you can easily sort through a bunch of them. (Firm numbers: the Android SDK site lists 54 intances of views in the public SDK, how long would it take to read the one liner documentation of all of those classes, more than an hour?) The API demos app is another great place to start, along with the other examples included with the SDK. kris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
