Android User Interface Development: Beginner’s Guide

03/21/2011 · No Responses

There are over 30,000 applications for Android that have been downloaded over a million times already. What makes yours any different? Building a compelling user-interface that people understand and enjoy is vital for the survival of a new application in an environment where look and feel may be the only thing between a user purchasing your application; or deleting it forever.

Working through examples, code-snippets, and screenshots this book introduces the fundamentals of good user-interface design from a developer’s point of view. This book will put you above the rest by showing you how to build striking user interfaces to grasp your app users’ attention enough to make them shell out some bucks to buy your application.

The Android User Interface Development Beginner’s Guide will tell you everything you need to know to style your applications from bottom up. Given the importance of user-interface design on a touch-screen device, this book aims to equip its reader with the knowledge required to build killer Android applications. Starting simply, and keeping things easy, this book will take you on a step-by-step journey to understanding the principals of good user-interface design, and how to implement the best user interfaces on an Android mobile device. It aims at building design understanding on a chapter-by-chapter basis, while introducing platform knowledge through examples.

A practical definitive guide for developers who want to design and develop attractive Android user-interfaces

What you will learn from this book

Design user-friendly interfaces that support quick and easy access to information
Explore and implement multiple layouts in Android to design user interfaces for the different screen sizes and densities
Ensure a consistent user-interface experience and improve your application performance by reusing your application components
Design easy-on-the-eye themes for your Android applications
Display and select complex data structures from applications such as an address-book or calendar application by using Android widgets
Entertain your application users by animating visual queues of what the application is currently doing, and what effect their actions are having
Customize the built-in classes in Android to enhance the user interface by creating tabs and galleries
Leverage Android’s resource loading system
Learn how best to present your user with information; or capture information from them
Work through examples featuring all major Android widgets, and some of the more unusual components

Approach
This is a step-by-step guide that aims to give even a novice Android developer a good grasp of user-interface design, while working through examples, diagrams, and screenshots to showcase the various widgets and tools that the platform makes available.

Who this book is written for
If you have a little experience in Java and want to build applications for the Android phones, then this book is for you. This book will also help you if you already have applications on the Android platform and want to gain additional knowledge of user-interface design. It will appeal to all of the following readers: