PhoneGap Eclipse PlugIn for Android. Supporting Multiple Screens. Android runs on a variety of devices that offer different screen sizes and densities.
For applications, the Android system provides a consistent development environment across devices and handles most of the work to adjust each application's user interface to the screen on which it is displayed. At the same time, the system provides APIs that allow you to control your application's UI for specific screen sizes and densities, in order to optimize your UI design for different screen configurations. For example, you might want a UI for tablets that's different from the UI for handsets. Although the system performs scaling and resizing to make your application work on different screens, you should make the effort to optimize your application for different screen sizes and densities.
In doing so, you maximize the user experience for all devices and your users believe that your application was actually designed for their devices—rather than simply stretched to fit the screen on their devices. Designer’s Guide to Supporting Multiple Android Device Screens. Unlike iPhones, Android devices do not have the same company developing both the software and hardware.
This leads to different combinations of screen sizes, resolutions and DPIs and creates quite a challenge when designing and developing for these devices. While the iPhone 3G/S and iPhone 4 have different resolutions and DPI, they share the same screen size and the resolutions follow the same aspect ratio. Therefore, an image can be created to fit the iPhone 4’s specifications and be nicely down-scaled to the iPhone 3G/S.
Credit to Steve Jobs for planning ahead and designing his phone with developers in mind. For some reason, manufactures using the Android OS on their phones did not give us the same luxury. We can spend all day comparing “Apples to Androids”, but instead let’s jump right into what we’re dealing with here. Popular Android Devices I thought it best to share a list of the most popular Android devices out in the market today and a few of their specifications. Designing For Android - Smashing Magazine. For designers, Android is the elephant in the room when it comes to app design.
As much as designers would like to think it’s an iOS1 world in which all anyones cares about are iPhones, iPads and the App Store, nobody can ignore that Android currently has the majority of smartphone market share2 and that it is being used on everything from tablets to e-readers. In short, the Google Android platform is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and brands are starting to notice. But let’s face it. Android’s multiple devices and form factors make it feel like designing for it is an uphill battle. And its cryptic documentation3 is hardly a starting point for designing and producing great apps. Further Reading on SmashingMag: Link If all this feels discouraging (and if it’s the reason you’re not designing apps for Android), you’re not alone.
This article will help designers become familiar with what they need to know to get started with Android and to deliver the right assets to the development team. Removing address bar from browser (to view on Android) Lock Screen Orientation in Android. This article describes how to force the orientation of an Android view not to change ie screen not to rotate.
How to lock the orientation How to detect the current orientation To programmatically detect the current orientation of the activity use the following code snippet. Theorientation property of the Configuration class returns three possible values corresponding to Landscape, Portrait and Square. Example : Locking rotation while performing an action. You might wish to disable the screen rotation whilst performing an action or by user command, to do this you need to combine the above samples to detect the current orientation and lock the display to that orientation.
Once your action has completed you may wish to enable screen rotation again, see the next section for an example on how to do this. How to re-enable screen rotation Leave a Reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Android Essentials: Adding Events to the User’s Calendar.