301Chapter 9
Android Graphic Design: Making
Your UI Designs Visual
In the first half of the book, I tried to stay as much “inside” of Android OS, Android SDK, and Eclipse
ADT as possible, to get a good “head start” on the dozens of core classes and concepts which the
Android developer should have knowledge of and mastery of, in order to have a global overview of
how everything in the Android OS fits together.
In the second half of the book, which will show you how to incorporate new media elements into your
app’s UI design, such as digital images, digital audio, digital video, and animation, we will venture
“outside” of the core Android development tools, and use software packages outside of Eclipse ADT
which are commonly used by application developers for new media content development.
You got a brief taste of this in Chapter 3 when we used the popular GIMP 2.8 digital imaging
application software to create a custom application icon for the Hello Universe application which
we had just created. We will also utilize GIMP in this chapter, to explore the graphics concepts
for this chapter and get some hands-on experience in applying image compositing concepts and
techniques we will be discovering during the course of the chapter.
There is no way I can cover all of the graphics concepts and topics that I would like to in one single
chapter, at least not using less than a hundred pages! However, if you want to dive into this particular
topic in Android app development specifically, Apress has the Pro Android Graphics (Apress, 2013) title
that I wrote, which features approximately 620 pages dedicated to this popular Android graphic design
concepts and techniques topic, and all of which applies to both Android 4.x as well as Android 5.x.
We will be covering several of the core Android classes which are used to implement graphic design
elements, such as ImageButton (which we started on in Chapter 8), ImageView, and NinePatch.
During this chapter, we will utilize these three Android graphics classes to “skin” the SlidingPane
UI layout container design. Skinning the UI design using graphics elements will enhance the visual
aspects of this UI design, and increase its interest to the end-user, as well as increasing its perceived
level of professionalism. We will also finish what we started in the previous chapter and “wire up” the
ImageButton widgets to make your SlidingPaneLayout UI interactive.