Book Review: Android User Interface Development 111
RickJWagner writes "So you want to be an Android developer? If you're like me, you've probably been wanting to learn how to program a mobile device, but just haven't found the time to master Objective-C. So now that Android is here, all of us garden-variety Java coders can jump on the bandwagon and start slinging apps out, right? Well, it turns out there's a little more to it than that. This book can make the trail from everyday Java code slinger to best-selling Android app writer a little more plausible." Read below for the rest of Rick's review.
The book does not teach Android development. For that, there are other books and the Android SDK documentation, which I found adequate for my uses so far. This book emphasizes teaching Android User Interface development, which is something I would not have had much of a clue about without the book. (The Java and XML-based configuration of Android is easy enough for a back-end Java coder like myself, but I've never been a web-design and layout guy. Or fat-client layout and design guy for that matter, either.) That's the sweet spot for this book.| Android User Interface Development | |
| author | Jason Morris |
| pages | Packt Publishing |
| publisher | 304 |
| rating | RickJWagner |
| reviewer | 1849514488 |
| ISBN | A good resource for Android developers who aren't already UI experts. |
| summary | 7/10 |
Android newbies do get an introductory chapter that guides the reader through setting up the SDK and writing a quick first app. After that, the book starts to take a serious UI bent, and that's o.k. because that's where the book's intended to go. The earliest chapters cover UI-centric matters like asking the user a question and processing the answer that is returned. List selections are explained (i.e. single-select button choices versus multi-select). Functional features like adding a header or a footer are explained.
The middle chapters cover pragmatic issues like producing an image gallery, handling date/time inputs, and validating user inputs. Layouts in Android are explained, which will be somewhat familiar to Java Swing developers. I had an interest in learning how animation works (don't we all dream of writing the next viral-selling game?), this is explained as well.
The final chapters deal with styling (i.e. how to change the way a button looks) and themes. It's very important that your application 'feels' like it should, and this is given adequate coverage in the book. I'm sure a back-end coder like myself would botch this part horribly without guidance, so I can appreciate the reason the book emphasizes these things.
The book is written in Packt's 'Cookbook' style. If you haven't seen one of these before, the book is largely cut up into sections covering some general idea. Within the section you'll find headings for the topics "Time for Action", "What Just Happened" and "Have a Go, Hero". "Time for Action" is a series of instructions that spell out exactly what to do for a sample scenario. "What Just Happened" follows up with an explanation of why the reader was asked to execute the instructions. "Have a Go, Hero" is a section challenging the reader to extend the spoon-fed instructions by implementing a next-step challenge. This style of writing emphasizes hands-on knowledge transfer without a lot of verbose theory, so it'll be good for readers who like to learn as they code. Contrast this to books that have a lengthy section of text explaining all the details of some topic, followed by a monolithic code blob towards the end of the chapter-- this book is not written that way.
The sample code that's available on Packt's site is clean and easy to understand. It follows the same structure as the sample code you'd find in the SDK, so if you're brand new to Android development you might start with the SDK teachings and then extend it with the book as soon as you're ready. I thought the examples the book presented were almost all reasonably relevant. The author did a good job of keeping the exercises presented throughout the book well contained, so you're never asked to code too much stuff at one time. I like that, as it lets you read the book without having to set aside a huge block of time at once to see the results of your coding efforts.
So who is this book good for? I'd say it's a good resource for Android developers who aren't already UI experts. I'm not saying it's good for Android newbies who need to learn the basics of Android programming, because there's just too little introductory material for that. But if you can already hack something together, and want it to be appealing to someone besides yourself, this book can help.
You can purchase Android User Interface Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Re:Does Android have an 'Interface Builder' yet? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does Android have an 'Interface Builder' yet? (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have to create two exact UIs, one for iphone/ipod and the other for the ipad using the XCode Interface Builder (assuming you don't just "scale" the smaller UI to the larger screen)?
You don't have to but in practice you do. Where the fingers are positioned when holding, the way the keyboard comes up, even the styles of navigation that make the most sense all differ from large to small devices.
Interface Builder in XCode provides very nice tools to build scalable interfaces, and they work well to support rotation. But if all you are doing to support a tablet is allowing a small screen to scale up... the in the immortal words of technical users the world over, you are Doing It Wrong.
The correct way to think about the move from a smartphone sized to display to a tablet sized display is the concept of Responsive Design [needmoredesigns.com].
That's a lot of text, but what is it really? It's realizing that with more space you can present more information, very well illustrated by this site that collects examples of responsive design:
http://mediaqueri.es [mediaqueri.es]
Now those are talking about the context of web design, but the idea applies equally well to application UI design.
What you should be doing in a design tool is building a scalable component that can be placed as a node into a responsive design.
But it does mean the container may be different depending on the device, where you select the best container at runtime - especially in terms of arranging navigation.
You can (Score:5, Informative)
On Android you can use the NDK.
On the iPhone you are perfectly free to use Objective-C++, or C, and mix in calls to the Objective-C framework.
Between the two life is probably easier for the C/C++ programmer on the ObjC side.
Oh and there's also mono for the iPhone if you prefer C#.