Chapter 3
Getting to Know the Android User Interface
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
- The various ViewGroups you can use to lay out your views
- How to adapt and manage changes in screen orientation
- How to create the UI programmatically
- How to listen for UI notifications
In Chapter 2, you learned about the Activity class and its life cycle. You learned that an activity is a means by which users interact with the application. However, an activity by itself does not have a presence on the screen. Instead, it has to draw the screen using Views and ViewGroups. In this chapter, you will learn the details about creating user interfaces in Android, and how users interact with them. In addition, you will learn how to handle changes in screen orientation on your Android devices.
UNDERSTANDING THE COMPONENTS OF A SCREEN
In Chapter 2, you learned that the basic unit of an Android application is an activity. An activity displays the user interface of your application, which may contain widgets such as buttons, labels, textboxes, and so on. Typically, you define your UI using an XML file (e.g., the main.xml file located in the res/layout folder of your project), which looks similar to the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:orientation="vertical" > <TextView android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" ...
