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Introduction to Skinning and Styling your Twitter App

Lesson 21 from: Building a Twitter App

Tony Hillerson

Introduction to Skinning and Styling your Twitter App

Lesson 21 from: Building a Twitter App

Tony Hillerson

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Lesson Info

21. Introduction to Skinning and Styling your Twitter App

Lesson Info

Introduction to Skinning and Styling your Twitter App

here we are part for this one's gonna be a fun class and hopefully it will be informative as well. But we're gonna be talking about skinning and styling, which is generally the words people use when they're talking about making some some interface look better on being able to control how things look with the fought sizes with the font Looks like backgrounds and it just all that kind of stuff. And we're gonna be doing it to Android today. What will be working through is how to change colors and how to ah, set up colors as resource is how to deal with changing the thoughts, font sizes and color and stuff like that of the of the fonts that you see inside the application. They will be talking about styling the components that we have so far. So like the list component, be at a text component, the buttons and as part of that will be talking about working with XML graphics. Uh, ap I. That android provides for you to define how graphical elements get to shape up on the screen. So themes and s...

tyles, that's what we're talking about today. And as we go through the code will see a few different new characters come up in this ongoing drama of android development. Themes are a way to basically plea put together a group of styles into a cohesive set of some sort of look and feel that you have for your android application. Now, this may, um, the naming seemed may, uh, kind of indicate to you that you could change these things on the fly, but you you can, but it's not. It's not as easy as just picking out different things. So this isn't quite the same. Was like offering a different set of themes to your user that they can quickly, um, sort of flip through but it. But it's a way to organize a set of styles that you can use to develop a, uh, a looking, fuel, consistent looking feel for your application and styles air. Just like you probably run into a different applications, or HTML or something like that. It's a way to specify the parameters of how something well look on the screen. So, like this button I want to be read, and I want the font face on the button to be San Serif and I wanted to be a white font, and I wanted to be 18 pixels tall. And that kind of stuff is what a style defines a selector, which may be a confusing bit of nomenclature for anybody who's worked with HTML CSS styles, Um, selector is not what you think it is. If if you already are familiar with that technology, what it is instead is a a way to specify different styles for different states of a component and android. So ah, component could be in different states if it is disabled, or if it is, ah, if it's selected or if the user is pressing it. Or if, ah, the window that it's in, which is, um, the ah, basically the view port that you see is the window with that. If that window is ah is ah, disabled or not, and that that can happen if like a pop up comes over or were observed, that one is focused. Something like that. So ah, a selector will specify allow you to specify different styles for those different states. We'll also be seeing a lot of SP's, D I. P s or DP's Um, and those stand for skilled pixels independency independent pixels. And we'll be talking over what those mean for designing for different screen sizes and resolutions as you get into talking about those Ah, a little bit later in the course earlier in the class. So it's not really the case that we have more user stories for the application of this point. But still, it's important. Always when you're thinking about designing for the user. Um, I mean, it's it's nice to make something look sweet. It's great that that something looks nice for someone to use on screen, and you want to definitely spend time on it. But, I mean, as you're thinking about the user, the reason to make something look nice is is Ah, I guess, a little bit quantifiable when you, when you start to think about, you know, experiences that you've had a on some sort of application on a computer if it looks solid. If there's a cohesive design, um, that's not too flashy, not too not to. It's not designed for different designs sake, but it's It gives the user some trust that the people that made this application had something like they had a good idea in mind for what this whole application is going to be pulled together as it's not going to be. They didn't just try to make this look like something sweet in one area, but it's not really it's not really designed in another area. It's not really styled up in another area. Ah, nice, tight, cohesive design will make the user trust your application a lot better. And it also of course, um, poisons of the things like tying together with the brand that you're developing under, um, and fitting in looking like the Maybe, if you if you also have a website that should, uh if it looks something like what? Like what the website looks like. If the design elements work together, then that's more Mawr Ah, brand recognition and also ties together your the different offerings that you're working on those those types of things are more quantifiable, quantifiable elements of making a design, um, come together for your android application? Um, just kind of Ah, just a note. I designed all this stuff that you see here, that the changes, the theme, the color, the colors and all the stuff I picked out. I'm not a designer out of just a developer. But I I think I did a fairly good job with this, and it looks OK. It doesn't look embarrassing. And it looks Ah, at least I think it looks cohesive. So you can definitely do a lot better than this. But but ah, the reason I mentioned I was this is gonna be just kind of a more fun class than the other ones. And we're gonna be talking about definitely some technical elements, but But I'll have a little bit more fun with it as it goes through. So feel free to could cheek any design choices I've made. And also, um, as you as you go after this class and style, whatever application you want work on, maybe you want to try toe style this one differently. Or play with a little bit more or offer up some of your designs. Maybe you could put those on the forms and we can have have a little fun looking at looking at something and so just code

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