Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Laying Out the User Interface

By default, Eclipse opened activity_quiz.xml in Android’s graphical layout tool, which shows you a preview of the layout. The graphical layout tool can be useful, but for now you are going to work in XML to get a better understanding of how layouts work.

To get to the raw XML, select the tab at the bottom of the editor labeled activity_quiz.xml.

Currently, activity_quiz.xml defines the default activity layout. The defaults change frequently, but the XML will look something like Listing 1.1.

Listing 1.1  Default activity layout (activity_quiz.xml)

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