Creating a Launcher Icon for the Application

When your app gets installed, an icon for it appears in the application launcher to help users identify its presence. When you created the Screen Brightness Toggle application, the ADT automatically included a default launcher icon for you, as shown in Figure 8-7.

Figure 8-7: The default Android launcher icon.

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Kind of bland, right? Change this icon to one of your own. I have a round sunshine icon that I created in an image-editing program, as shown in Figure 8-8. You can create your own (as shown in the following section) or download mine from this book's companion website.

Figure 8-8: The new sunshine application icon.

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Designing a custom launcher icon

Creating your own launcher icons is fairly easy thanks to the Android project. The Android documentation contains a full article, entitled “Icon Design Guidelines, Android 2.0,” that includes a how-to manual for creating icons for the Android platform, along with a style guide, dos and don'ts, materials and colors, size and positioning guidelines, and best of all, icon templates that you can use. You can find all of the design guidelines at http://d.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/icon_design.html.

Working with templates

Because you've already downloaded the Android SDK, icon templates ...

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