Getting Started

You might be wondering what a custom view is; that's alright, we'll cover that and way more in this book. If you've been developing Android applications for a while, you've most probably used the standard Android views or widgets tons of times. These are, for example: TextView, ImageView, Button, ListView, and so on. A custom view is slightly different. To summarize it quickly, a custom view is a view or a widget where we've implemented its behavior ourselves. In this chapter, we'll cover the very basics steps we'll need to get ourselves started building Android custom views and understand where we should use them and where we should simply rely on the Android standard widgets. More specifically, we will talk about the following topics:

• What's a custom view and why do we need them?
• How to set up and configure our environment to develop custom views
• Creating our very own first custom view