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Android Design Patterns and Best Practice
Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice: Create reliable, robust, and efficient Android apps with industry-standard design patterns

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Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

Chapter 2. Creational Patterns

In the previous chapter, we took a look at the factory pattern and its associated abstract factory pattern. However, we looked at these patterns in quite a general way and not at how these objects, once created, can be represented and manipulated on an Android device. In other words, the patterns we built could have been applied in many other software environments, and to see how to make them more Android-specific we need to take a look at Android UIs and how they are composed.

In this chapter, we will concentrate on how to represent our products as Android UI components. We will use the card view to display these, and each card will contain a title, an image, some descriptive text, and the ingredient's calorific value, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

Creational Patterns

This will lead us to take an initial look at material design, a powerful and increasingly popular visual design language for creating clean and intuitive UIs. Conceived originally for...

Applying themes

As developers, we want our apps to stand out from the crowd, but we also want to incorporate all the features that Android users are familiar with. One way to do this is by applying a particular color scheme throughout an app. This is most easily done by customizing or creating Android themes

Since API level 21 (Android 5.0), the material theme has been default on Android devices. It is, however, more than just a new look. The material theme also provides as default the touch feedback and transition animations that we associate with material design. As with all Android themes, the material themes are based on Android styles.

An Android style is a set of graphical properties defining the appearance of a particular screen component. Styles allow us to define everything from font size and background color to padding and elevation, and much more. An Android theme is simply a style applied across a whole activity or application. Styles are defined as XML files, and stored in the...

Customizing color and text

The first things we need to consider when applying a theme are colors and text. Material design guidelines recommend selecting these colors from a predefined series of palettes.

Using palettes

The two most significant colors we can edit in a material theme are the primary colors. They are applied directly to the status and app bars and give an app a distinctive look without affecting the uniform feel of the platform as a whole. Both these colors should be selected from the same color palette. There are many such palettes available, and the entire collection can be found at www.google.com/design/spec/style/color.html#color-color-palette.

Whichever palette you decide to use as your primary colors, Google recommend that you use shades with values of 500 and 700:

Using palettes

This does not have to be enforced too strictly, but it usually a good idea to stick close to these values and to always select two shades of the same color.

Tip

The theme editor can be very helpful here; not...

Adding image resources

One of the most interesting challenges that Android offers is the vast number of screen densities and sizes that we have to cater for. This is particularly true when it comes displaying bitmap images, where there are two competing issues that need to be resolved:

  • Low resolution images display very poorly when stretched to fit on large or high resolution screens
  • High quality images use up far more memory than is needed when displayed on smaller, low density screens.

Screen sizes aside, the problem of differing screen densities is mostly solved with the use of density-independent pixels (dp).

Managing screen densities

Dps are an abstract unit of measurement based on a screen displaying 160 dpi. This means that a widget with a width of 320 dp will always be 2'' wide regardless of screen density. When it comes to the actual physical dimensions of a screen, this can be managed with a variety of layout types, libraries, and properties such as weight and gravity, but...

Creating a card view

The card view is one of the most recognizable material design components. It is designed to show several pieces of content that all apply to a single subject. This content is usually a combination of graphics, text, action buttons, and icons, and cards are a great way to present a selection of choices in a uniform way. This makes it a good choice for displaying our sandwich ingredients and related information such as price or calorific value. We will use the factory pattern from the previous chapter to do this, but before we see what code needs changing, let's take a look at how we implement the card view in the first place.

Understanding card view properties

If your minimum target SDK is 21 or greater, then the CardView widget will be included as standard. Otherwise, you will need to include the cardview support library. This is easily added in the build.gradle file by including the following highlighted line:

dependencies { 
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs...

Applying themes


As developers, we want our apps to stand out from the crowd, but we also want to incorporate all the features that Android users are familiar with. One way to do this is by applying a particular color scheme throughout an app. This is most easily done by customizing or creating Android themes

Since API level 21 (Android 5.0), the material theme has been default on Android devices. It is, however, more than just a new look. The material theme also provides as default the touch feedback and transition animations that we associate with material design. As with all Android themes, the material themes are based on Android styles.

An Android style is a set of graphical properties defining the appearance of a particular screen component. Styles allow us to define everything from font size and background color to padding and elevation, and much more. An Android theme is simply a style applied across a whole activity or application. Styles are defined as XML files, and stored in the...

Customizing color and text


The first things we need to consider when applying a theme are colors and text. Material design guidelines recommend selecting these colors from a predefined series of palettes.

Using palettes

The two most significant colors we can edit in a material theme are the primary colors. They are applied directly to the status and app bars and give an app a distinctive look without affecting the uniform feel of the platform as a whole. Both these colors should be selected from the same color palette. There are many such palettes available, and the entire collection can be found at www.google.com/design/spec/style/color.html#color-color-palette.

Whichever palette you decide to use as your primary colors, Google recommend that you use shades with values of 500 and 700:

This does not have to be enforced too strictly, but it usually a good idea to stick close to these values and to always select two shades of the same color.

Tip

The theme editor can be very helpful here; not only...

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Key benefits

  • Create efficient object interaction patterns for faster and more efficient Android development
  • Get into efficient and fast app development and start making money from your android apps
  • Implement industry-standard design patterns and best practices to reduce your app development time drastically

Description

Are you an Android developer with some experience under your belt? Are you wondering how the experts create efficient and good-looking apps? Then your wait will end with this book! We will teach you about different Android development patterns that will enable you to write clean code and make your app stand out from the crowd. The book starts by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different design and layout patterns and get to know the best practices of how to use them together. Then you’ll then develop an application that will help you grasp activities, services, and broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user-detecting classes and APIs such as gesture detection, touch screen listeners, and sensors to your app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, auto, and TV. Finally, you will see how to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns as well as the best publishing and monetizing practices. The book will start by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different Design and layout patterns and learn the best practices on how to use them together. You will then develop an application that will help you grasp Activities, Services and Broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user detecting classes and APIs such as at gesture detection, touch screen listeners and sensors to our app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, Auto, and TV. Finally, you will learn to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns and best publishing and monetizing practices.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for Android developers who have some basic android development experience. Basic Java programming knowledge is a must to get the most out of this book.

What you will learn

  • Build a simple app and run it on real and emulated devices
  • Explore the WYSIWYG and XML approaches to material design provided within Android Studio
  • Detect user activities by using touch screen listeners, gesture detection, and reading sensors
  • Apply transitions and shared elements to employ elegant animations and efficiently use the minimal screen space of mobile devices
  • Develop apps that automatically apply the best layouts for different devices by using designated directories
  • Socialize in the digital word by connecting your app to social media
  • Make your apps available to the largest possible audience with the AppCompat support library
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Publication date : Dec 26, 2016
Length: 370 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781786467218
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Table of Contents

13 Chapters
1. Design Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Creational Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Material Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Layout Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Structural Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Activating Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Combining Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Composing Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Observing Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Behavioral Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Wearable Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
12. Social Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
13. Distribution Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.3
(3 Ratings)
5 star 33.3%
4 star 0%
3 star 33.3%
2 star 33.3%
1 star 0%
Sudarsan Jul 28, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
very nice book with complex concepts explain in easy way
Amazon Verified review Amazon
GN Reddy Jan 24, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
Did not take any care in writing and editing. Explanation is awkward.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Damian Hamilton Jul 23, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
This book is mysterious: why does a book have no customer reviews after being on the market for 2 years (2018 at the time of this review), and why is Amazon promoting it at the top of the list?The author may well be a very good programmer and even a good writer, but the book is not good. It reads like a good idea with a rushed execution. Errata fill page after page (yet the publisher's website doesn't seem to have an errata page for this volume - in fact, I couldn't find this volume at all when I went to the page listed in the book and searched for the title.) Code examples are often half-finished with blatant gaps and missing code; or code just doesn't match the text describing it, or vital details are left out.I was hoping the core premise of the book would be a straightforward "here is a list of common Android projects; here are the Industry Standard steps you can follow to narrow down which Design Patterns are best for a given problem." Instead it just lists design pattern concepts and chucks in some (broken) code for you to clumsily follow along, and sometimes explains why you're doing X instead of Y ... but not usually.A whole team of proofreaders and editors is listed inside the cover (Safis Editing?) but I find it hard to believe that anyone proofread this book at all. Honestly, if I had to guess, I'd say the author was 3/4 of the way through his first rough draft and the publisher told him it was due and sent it out the door, sight unseen.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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