Exploring Android UI design

We will see with Android UI design that so much of what we learn is context sensitive. The way that a given widget's x attribute will influence its appearance might depend on a widget's y attribute or even on an attribute on another widget. It isn't easy to learn this verbatim. It is best to expect to gradually achieve better and faster results with practice.

For example, if you play with the designer by dragging and dropping widgets onto the design, the XML code that is generated will vary quite considerably depending upon which layout type you are using. We will see this as we proceed through this chapter.

This is because different layout types use different means to decide on the position of their children. For example, the LinearLayout we will explore next works very differently to the ConstraintLayout that was added by default to our project in Chapter 1, Beginning Android and Java.

This information might initially seem like a problem, or even a bad idea,...