UI Design

The one feature that stands out in Android Studio above all others, including the Gradle build system, is the powerful User Interface(UI) development tools. The IDE provides a variety of views of our designs, allowing us to combine drag and drop construction and hard code in the development of a UI. Android Studio also comes equipped with a comprehensive preview system, which allows us to test our designs on any manner of device before running the project on an actual device. Along with these features, Android Studio also includes useful support libraries, such as the design library for creating material design layouts and the Percent Support Library for simplifying complex, proportional designs.

This chapter is the first of four, covering UI development. In it, we take a closer look at Studio's Layout Editors and tools. We will be building working interfaces using each of the most useful Layout/ViewGroup classes and designing for and managing screen rotation. The chapter continues by exploring Studio's preview system and how XML layout resources are stored and applied. The chapter concludes by returning to themes, Material Design, and the design support library.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• Explore the Layout Editor
• Apply linear and relative layouts
• Install the constraint library
• Create a ConstraintLayout
• Apply constraints
• Use the graphical constraints editor
• Add constraint guidelines
• Align TextView baselines
• Apply bias
• Use auto-connect
• Build a hardware profile for a virtual device
• Create a virtual SD card