Building Android UIs with Custom Views

Key Features

• Move beyond default UI templates, create and customize amazing UIs with Android Custom View
• Enable smooth data flow and create futuristic UIs by creating flexible custom views
• Scale your apps with responsive and data intensive views

Book Description

To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices.

This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions.

You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them.

By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users.

What you will learn

• Extend the standard UI widget framework by creating Custom views
• Add complex rendering, animations, and interactions to your views
• Optimize performance and decrease battery usage
• Implement custom views to share between multiple projects, or share it publicly
• Create 3D custom views using OpenGL ES

About the Author

Raimon Ràfols Montané is a software engineer currently living in the Barcelona area. He has been working on mobile devices since their early stages, ranging from monochrome devices to the current smartphones. During this time, he has worked in several areas: B2C/B2E/B2B apps, portals, and mobile gaming. Due to this broad experience, he has expertise in many technologies and, especially in UI, build systems, and client-server communications.

He is currently working as an engineering manager at AXA Group Solutions in Barcelona, taking care of all the engineering and development processes, mobile application quality, and leading the R&D team. In the past, he has worked abroad for Imagination Technologies near London and for Service2Media in the Netherlands.

In his spare time, he enjoys taking part in hackathons, photography, and speaking at conferences. Raimon has won more than 40 international awards, including AngelHack Barcelona 2015, Facebook World Hack Barcelona. Also, he has secured the second place at JS1k 2016. He was the chairman of the Transforming Industries Summit at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2017, where he also spoke about Enterprise Transformation. In addition, he has given talks speaking about Android and Java performance, bytecode, custom views, and entrepreneurship in at several conferences around the world.

In addition, Raimon is the coauthor of Learning Android Application Development, also published by Packt, and he has been the technical reviewer of several other titles, including Mastering Android NDK and Android Things Projects, among others.

Table of Contents

1. Getting started
2. Implementing your first Custom View
3. Handling events
4. Advanced 2D Rendering
5. Introducing 3D Custom Views
6. Animations
7. Performance Considerations
8. Sharing our Custom View
9. Building an Electronic Programming Guide
10. Building a Charts component
11. Creating a 3D spinning wheel menu

Raimon Ràfols Montané is a software engineer currently living in the Barcelona area. He has been working on mobile devices since their early stages, ranging from monochrome devices to the current smartphones. During this time, he has worked in several areas: B2C/B2E/B2B apps, portals, and mobile gaming. Due to this broad experience, he has expertise in many technologies and, especially in UI, build systems, and client-server communications.

He is currently working as an engineering manager at AXA Group Solutions in Barcelona, taking care of all the engineering and development processes, mobile application quality, and leading the R&D team. In the past, he has worked abroad for Imagination Technologies near London and for Service2Media in the Netherlands.

In his spare time, he enjoys taking part in hackathons, photography, and speaking at conferences. Raimon has won more than 40 international awards, including AngelHack Barcelona 2015, Facebook World Hack Barcelona. Also, he has secured the second place at JS1k 2016. He was the chairman of the Transforming Industries Summit at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2017, where he also spoke about Enterprise Transformation. In addition, he has given talks speaking about Android and Java performance, bytecode, custom views, and entrepreneurship in at several conferences around the world.

In addition, Raimon is the coauthor of Learning Android Application Development, also published by Packt, and he has been the technical reviewer of several other titles, including Mastering Android NDK and Android Things Projects, among others.