26.1 Design and Layout Views

The chapter entitled “A Guide to the Android Studio Layout Editor Tool” explained that the Android Studio Layout Editor tool provides two ways to view the user interface layout of an activity in the form of Design and Layout (also known as blueprint) views. These views of the layout may be displayed individually or, as in Figure 26-1, side-by-side:

Figure 26-1

The Design view (positioned on the left in the above figure) presents a “what you see is what you get” representation of the layout, wherein the layout appears as it will within the running app. The Layout view, on the other hand, displays a blueprint style of view where the widgets are represented by shaded outlines. As can be seen in Figure 26-1 above, Layout view also displays the constraint connections (in this case opposing constraints used to center a button within the layout). These constraints are also overlaid onto the Design view when a specific widget...