316 CHAPTER 9: Android Graphic Design: Making Your UI Designs Visual
Figure 9-6. Launch the Draw 9-patch software, and use the File menu to access the Draw 9-patch Open dialog
If you intend to use the Draw 9-patch software a lot, you can also select the Create shortcut option
on the menu shown in Figure 9-5 and drag the shortcut to your quick launch taskbar so you don’t
have to go through this work process more than once!
As you can see in Figure 9-6, the Windows Command Line Terminal software will open up, and will
run the draw9patch.bat, which then opens a Draw 9-patch software editing window, on top of a
cmd.exe Terminal window. You should minimize the Terminal window, and leave the Draw 9-patch
editing tool open for use.
Opening the Source Digital Image in Draw 9-patch
Now that you have located and installed Draw 9-patch, you are ready to use the software to create
NinePatchDrawable (object) image assets for use in Android applications. The first step is to open
the source digital image asset which you want to turn into a NinePatchDrawable object for use in
Android.
There are two ways to open the source PNG files for 9-patch development. You can either drag the
PNG image onto the Draw 9-patch window, where the “drop it here” arrow is, in the center, or use
the File ➤ Open 9-patch work process, and locate the file in this book repository’s NinePatch
sub-folder.