More App Customizations

Overview  Application/ Activity Customizations: Themes  Menu Customizations  Custom Dialogs  Custom Toasts  Custom Buttons  Custom ListView

Themes

Recap: Styles  Styles are collections of properties used in Views  Styles, however, are targetted.  They only affect the View specified even a Layout which could have multiple Views inside it will not pass the style values to these

Theme  Styles can be applied globally across a whole application by styling an Application or Activity  Used in this way a style is called a theme  Styling an Activity will affect all Views in the activity  Styling an Application will affect all Activities and Views in those activities  Themes can also contain properties that are not usable by Views

Theme-specific properties  Some style properties, however, are not supported by any View elements and can only be applied as part of a theme.  These style properties apply to the entire window and not to any type of View.  For example, style properties for a theme can hide the application title, hide the status bar, or change the window's background.  android:windowNoTitle  android:windowFullscreen  android:windowBackground

Example  more windowXXX attributes can be found in file:///C:/android-sdk- windows/docs/reference/android/R.attr fill_parent wrap_content #00FF00 monospace

Example  If you want the theme applied only to a specific activity add the android:theme attribute to the tag instead <application <activity android:name=".AppCustomizationActivity"

Menu Customization

Custom Menus  Options menus options can have icons associated to them  Context menus cannot take icons

Custom Menu via XML  Adding icons to options menus is easy simply add an android:icon attribute with the image id

Custom Toasts

 Toasts do not have to look like plain text on black  They can be fully customized like an Activity  Simply define a layout using the GraphicalEditor or XML  Attach this to the Toast

Example  Save this as toast_layout.xml

Example LayoutInflater inflater = getLayoutInflater(); View layout = inflater.inflate(R.layout.toast_layout, (ViewGroup) findViewById(R.id.toast_layout_root)); ImageView image = (ImageView) layout.findViewById(R.id.image); image.setImageResource(R.drawable.android); TextView text = (TextView) layout.findViewById(R.id.text); text.setText("Hello! This is a custom toast!"); Toast toast = new Toast(getApplicationContext()); toast.setGravity(Gravity.CENTER_VERTICAL, 0, 0); toast.setDuration(Toast.LENGTH_LONG); toast.setView(layout); toast.show();  Load the layout and initialize the views  Create a Toast  Attach the layout to a Toast and provide other initializations  show()

Note  Do not use the public constructor for a Toast unless you are going to define the layout with setView(View).setView(View)  If you do not have a custom layout to use, you must use makeText(Context, int, int) to create the Toast as beforemakeText(Context, int, int)

Custom Dialogs

 Generally AlertDialog is all you will need for most Dialog requirements  If you can get away with AlertDialog use it  If AlertDialog does not provide what you need, it is possible to define your own Dialog layout  The process is similar to defining an Activity layout

Example

Example  Create the Dialog object manually and initialize using the layout specified  Note: this code would be part of showDialog(int i) as one of the cases Context mContext = getApplicationContext(); Dialog dialog = new Dialog(mContext); dialog.setContentView(R.layout.custom_dialog); dialog.setTitle("Custom Dialog"); TextView text = (TextView) dialog.findViewById(R.id.text); text.setText("Hello, this is a custom dialog!"); ImageView image = (ImageView) dialog.findViewById(R.id.image); image.setImageResource(R.drawable.android);

Special widget customization

Specific widget customization  Many widgets have specific customization options  E.g. Buttons  Icons  Animated (hover image change)  Background image

Button customization  To change the look of a button is done via XML and supplying replacement images for the button  Requires defining a selector resource and passing this as the button’s background  The selector defines the different button states and how it will look in each state

Example <item android:state_enabled="false" /> <item android:state_pressed="true" android:state_enabled="true" /> <item android:state_focused="true" android:state_enabled="true" /> <item android:state_enabled="true" />

Example <Button android:text="Button" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content">

ListView customization  ListView customization works similar to Button customization  Define a selector with the different selection states  For more information:  iew-item-background-via-custom-selector iew-item-background-via-custom-selector