James Montemagno
James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.

Live, Love, Bike, and Code

Share


Tags


Part 3: My StepCounter Android: Pretty UI!

I am no UI expert that is for sure, but I really like what Michael James did with the iOS version of My StepCounter. He made a nice background that changed colors from Red to Green, had a chromeless UI, and utilized very nice fonts. I want to take advantage of some of the work he did and also customize it for android.

Transparent ActionBar

I Wanted to ensure that the full screen was being utilized for this app, but still wanted to take advantage of the unique actions that I can put in the ActionBar. Luckily Android is highly customizable with styles and themes. To create a transparent actionbar you need to override your themes.ActionBar style and give the android:background and android:backgroundStacked a transparent colors. Additionally I wanted to only show the title and then style the TextStyle to be a bit larger and also use a sans-serif-light.



This bit of code results in a stunning and beautiful look:

Pretty Fonts

I was really impressed with the font selection and usage on the iOS version and I wanted to bring that over to Android. Since I am targeting Android 4.4 I can use all of the nice Roboto fonts built in. If I was targeting an older version I could have used my Roboto.TextView control, however all I need to do is set the android:fontFamily to:

These are all great fonts and when combined with a nice background I get a nice visual look:

Fancy Background

In the iOS version Michael created a custom ProgressView that would change the background RGB based on the percentage that you passed into it. I was actually able to re-use nearly all of this code and put it into a shared file. The main difference was just what property I was settings and how I was creating a new color:



As we can see I have to do a lot of #if defs, but it is nice to re-use all of this RGB arrays so we get the same color on the device. The screenshot I showed earlier you saw a blue background, but what I didn’t show you was how I created this. What I actually did was make my root view the ProgressView, which is a FrameLayout, and then I overlaid another FrameLayout with a blue background on it.

This blue frame layout will be animated later, but here are a few screen shots of what the progress view looks like as I move it:

No Boundaries

After having a few people test out the app I got some instant feedback, which was that I should extend the views up to the System Bar and Navigation Bar. This is a brand new feature in Android 4.4 so why not take advantage of it! It was actually really simple. The first thing I needed to do was add android:windowTranslucentNavigation=“true” and android:windowTranslucentNavigation=“true” to my style:


Now to ensure that any content on the bottom of the screen didn’t overlap there is an important property to set, which is: android:fitsSystemWindows=“true”. I had to wrap my two text views in a FrameLayout which is where I set this property:

And here you have it the final UI:

So there is my base UI with the same ProgressView that we are using on iOS now on Android with pretty fonts as well. Next up is Animations!

Live, Love, Bike, and Code

Checkout my monthly newsletter that you should subscribe to!

Copyright © James Montemagno 2014 All rights reserved. Privacy Policy

View Comments