Ragtag

Getting started with views

2010 November 21

I wanted to get somewhere fast with with Android's 2d libraries so I leapt right in with some some JavaDoc trawling and some learning-by-doing. I've written up my couple of hours of experimentation below.

Topics covered:

• Declarative layouts
• Drawing on a Canvas
• Subclassing View and ViewGroup
• Customising a view's the measurements and positioning

Setting a goal

In a previous project, I made a simple web service which allowed "check-ins" to record progress and would produce data representing a graph of check-ins per period. I thought that hooking this service up to an android app might be a good medium-term project. As a tiny first step I thought I'd try and produce an on-screen graph. This gave me a small, achievable goal to hack towards.