Chapter 4. Designing Your User Interface Using Views

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

  • How to use the basic views in Android to design your user interface

  • How to use the picker views to display lists of items

  • How to use the list views to display lists of items

In the previous chapter, you learned about the various layouts that you can use to position your views in an activity. You also learned about the techniques you can use to adapt to different screen resolutions and sizes. In this chapter, you will take a look at the various views that you can use to design the user interface for your applications.

In particular, you will learn about the following view groups:

  • Basic views — Commonly used views such as the TextView, EditText, and Button views

  • Picker views — Views that enable users to select from a list, such as the TimePicker and DatePicker views

  • List views — Views that display a long list of items, such as the ListView and the SpinnerView views

Subsequent chapters will cover the other views not covered in this chapter, such as the date and time picker views and other views for displaying graphics, etc.

BASIC VIEWS

To get started, let's explore some of the basic views that you can use to design the UI of your Android applications:

  • TextView

  • EditText

  • Button

  • ImageButton

  • CheckBox

  • ToggleButton

  • RadioButton

  • RadioGroup

These basic views enable you to display text information, as well as perform some basic selection. The following sections explore all these views in more detail.

TextView View

When you create ...

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