Thursday, February 16, 2012

Summary of presentation with tips on creating visually appealing Android applications that scale to various screen sizes

Interesting points from a presentation in which Eric Burke shares tips on creating visually appealing Android applications that scale to various screen sizes.
The session focuses on custom views, rounded corners, scalable drawables, gradients, shine, holograms etc.
Eric is the St. Louis Engineering Manager and Android Tech Lead with Square.

06:00 Use alpha compositing with anti-aliasing, not canvas.clipPath() because you get jagged pixelated corners

17:25 triangular shine

29:00 Check the imeOptions for EditTexts/keyboard input. E.g imeOptions="actionNext" for example. Or "actionDone". NOTE: does not work on HTC Sense UI! So "actionNext" seems safest (might work, might not, but no harm done). For "actionDone" you still need a button for it on your screen anyway.
31:00 SafeViewFlipper code because the standard one crashes your app eventually (guaranteed) on pre-HoneyComb!
35:00 Holograms! Using the accelerator it acts as if it's shiny. Cool!
39:00 demo of cards sliding in/out and hologram on emulator

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