Styling Android

In the previous article we got a basic navigation drawer working. In this article of this series, we’ll begin hooking it up to the ActionBar.
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As I am writing this it is Google I/O week 2013. Amongst the new releases this week is a new version of the v4 support library (release 13) which contains support for the Navigation Drawer pattern. This pattern steadily grown in popularity, but until this point there has been no official support and guidelines from Google. This has now changed, and there are official design guidelines. In the recent series on Adapters we created an app which used Spinner navigation in the ActionBar to switch between different examples. In this short series we’ll convert this to use the Navigation Drawer pattern instead.
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Previously in this series we’ve looked at different kinds of Adapters, and in two separate separate series on Styling Android (ViewPager and ViewPager Redux) we’ve looked at ViewPagers. In this article we’re going to look at the common factor of both of these: PagerAdapters.
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Previously in this series we’ve looked at how to use Adapters in various ways, and how to keep the scrolling of our ListViews smooth. In this article, we’ll turn our attention to how to bind a ListView to data which is stored in a SQLite database.
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In the previous article we looked at getting our ListView scrolling smooth by optimising the operations that we are performing in the getView() method of our Adapter. In this article we’ll look at adding images to each ListView item and consider the performance implications of doing that.
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In the previous article we got an ArrayAdapter and a slightly more complex SimpleAdapter working, but suggested that we could also achieve the same result as the SimpleAdapter using an ArrayAdapter. In this article we’ll look at how to do this, but also explore some performance issues which we need to be aware of when working with Adapters.
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In the previous article we began our look at Adapters by connecting up the List Navigation Spinner in our ActionBar. In this article we’ll look at applying an Adapter to a ListView.
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In the past on Styling Android we have covered a variety of topics which make use of Adapters. In the series’ on ListView, ViewPager and ActionBar (to name but a few) we’ve used Adapters but kept the Adapter implementation really simple so that we may focus on the subject in question. However, on a few of these articles there are comments asking how to do different behaviours which actually require changes to the Adapter being used rather than the feature being covered in that particular article. In this series we’ll have a detailed look at Adapters, and the power and versatility that they provide us.
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Recently there was a comment on the article on Text Shadows asking how to fill text with a gradient. In this article we’ll look at a simple technique for doing precisely that.
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In the previous article we got a basic app set up and got our images set up ready to create an image in which part of the colour could change depending on the values of three SeekBars representing the red, green, and blue components. In this article we’ll look at how we actually apply those colour values and create the required image.
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