Android™ Application Development All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 4: Apps for Tablets

In This Chapter

Adjusting for screen size and screen orientation

Managing multipanel activities

Don’t think about an elephant.

Okay, now that you’re thinking about an elephant, think about an elephant’s legs. The diameter of an elephant’s leg is typically about 40 centimeters (more than four tenths of a yard).

And think about spiders of the Pholcidae family (the “daddy longlegs”) with their hair-like legs. And think about Gulliver with his Brobdingnagian friends. Each Brobdingnagian was about 72 feet tall, but a Brobdingnagian adult had the same physical proportions as Gulliver.

Gulliver’s Travels is a work of fiction. An animal whose height is 12 times a human’s height can’t have bone sizes in human proportions. In other words, if you increase an object’s size, you have to widen the object’s supports. If you don’t, the object will collapse.

This unintuitive truth about heights and widths comes from some geometric facts. An object’s bulk increases as the cube of the object’s height. But the ability to support that bulk increases only as the square of the object’s height. That’s because weight support depends on the cross-sectional area of the supporting legs, and a cross-sectional area is a square measurement, not a cubic measurement.

Anyway, the sizes ...