Posts Tagged ‘custom’

Android UI: Making an Analog Rotary Knob

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

For some reason, I really enjoy recreating analog components on Android. Today I’d like to share my experience of re-creating a knob that looks like this:

As you can guess, this type of knob does not have min/max bounds and can be freely rotated as much as you want. This type of control is often used for browsing through a list of options that can be wrapped around. Also, an important property is that this knob does not rotate smoothly but switches from one nick to another. You can imagine that it also clicks when you rotate it – and our Android replica will also make that sound!

Here’s how the Android version looks:

I’ve included the source into this article. However, please be warned it is not completed and you will need to fix or finish few things before you can use this code in your own app.

And now, let’s get down to work!

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Android Beatz: Making a Drum Machine App

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Hello again! I’m back from a wonderful vacation and ready to share some more experience of Android programming. Today I’m presenting a simple drum machine app that I made for fun. If you saw the video above, then you probably got the idea how a drum machine works. The design was inspired by one of the greatest drum machines ever – the AKAI MPC. You can have a look at how the original device looked like for example here. Our app is, of course, greatly simplified compared to AKAI MPC, but you can have some fun with it too.

Here’s a screenshot for a better idea of how the UI looks (clickable):

Some interesting features of this app:

  1. The UI is done using bitmaps and custom controls to imitate the original device
  2. The latency is low enough not to be annoying (at least on my Droid)
  3. You can press multiple buttons at once which is very good for long samples such as the bass drum
  4. The LCD screen control uses a 9-patch bitmap background, and switches between flashing, static and ticker text
  5. The LCD screen uses a custom TrueType font that is included within the app

Now let’s see how the most interesting features of this app were implemented (as usual, the source is available at the bottom of the article).

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Android Custom UI: Making a Vintage Thermometer

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Hi everyone. Today I would like to show how to design a simple yet cool-looking custom UI element for Android. Since an analog clock is already part of the standard UI, I came up with an vintage thermometer as an example.

The final result looks like this:

Here’s the list of nice features this custom view has:

  • A gradient metallic rim and a textured face
  • The logo changes its color depending on the temperature (as you can see in the screenshots)
  • A circle-bent title below the logo
  • A 3D hand with a shadow
  • The hand moves in a physically realistic fashion
  • And, of course, it shows the real temperature – based on the phone temperature sensor (if your phone has one)

Also, the thermometer view tries to be a good Android UI citizen:

  • Scales well to any size
  • Supports screen orientation changes and layout changes
  • Optimizes its drawing procedures, doesn’t eat CPU when the hand is not moving
  • Saves and restores its state gracefully when the activity is paused, re-created etc.
  • Reusable – not bound to any external code

If you’d like to know how to develop views of this kind, read on. It’s so easy and fun to do that you will be surprised.

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