Exploring Android UI design

We will see with Android UI design that so much of what we learn is context sensitive. The way that a given widget's x property will influence its appearance might depend on a widget's y property. It probably isn't possible to learn this verbatim. It is most likely best to expect to gradually get better and faster results with practice.

For example, if you play with the designer by dragging and dropping widgets onto the design, the XML code that is generated will vary quite extensively depending upon which layout type you are using. This is because different layout types use different means to determine the position of their children. We will see this, perhaps most distinctly, when we look at RelativeLayout later in the chapter.

This information might initially seem like a problem, or a bad idea, and it certainly is a little awkward at first. What we will grow to learn, however, is that this apparent abundance of layout options and their individual...