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I'm working on implementing a UI for an Android application, and I wanted to ask if there is already something in the native widgets to accomplish most of what I'm trying to do.

The application that I'm working on performs 15 different tasks that can be divided into 3 different groups. (5 tasks per group) I have 18 icon images (3 for the groups and 15 for the individual tasks) and I want to be able to panel these icons (starting with the groups) like this:

enter image description here

I want the next icon visible below and above (if further down than the first icon) and swipe to go to the next icon

enter image description here

Once an icon is clicked, the panels slide to the side, exposing the next layer (the specific 5 tasks for the selected group) with the selected group still visible on the side:

enter image description here

From there, the user can tell at a glance what group they are in, what the current, next and previous selectable tasks are, and that by swiping right, they can get back to the group selection.

What types of widgets would I need to look into in order to accomplish something like this? Are there already pre-built lists to do these activities?

Thanks for any guidance!

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  • 6
    Cool UI Idea! Just saying... Commented May 24, 2011 at 16:16
  • 1
    Thanks! It's for a school research project. We're trying to build an interface with only pictures, no words, and be completely intuitive. That design took me all yesterday to think up... now time for implementation! Commented May 24, 2011 at 16:31
  • Reminds me of the dashboard used in more recent Playstation consoles. Commented Jun 7, 2011 at 14:08

4 Answers 4

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You can get close with a LinearLayout of ImageView widgets and a ScrollView (vertical) or HorizontalScrollView. However, it will not give you the desired "centered image with bits of the previous/next images" effect -- it will be wherever the user positions it.

You can get close with a Gallery. However, it will not give you the vertical orientation, and it will always give you a fixed set of full options to the sides, not the partial images that you seek.

If it's gotta be the way you describe it, you'll have to roll it yourself. Gestures and animations should give you the desired effect.

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3 Comments

I was afraid of that... What if I set a scrollview to fill 90% width and then have an image view or something taking the other 10%? I am think about playing with the listeners in the scrollview and if there is something that triggers on mouse up, I can just do something like a "ScrollTo(int)" method that will always scroll the user to a defined interval based on where the view was last positioned when the OnMouseUp occured. What do you think?
@joe_coolish: "I can just do something like a "ScrollTo(int)" method that will always scroll the user to a defined interval based on where the view was last positioned when the OnMouseUp occured." -- hmmmm... that might work. Might be tricky to get it to work on all screen sizes/densities, since presumably you will have multiple sizes of images.
I think I'm going to make all the icons the same size. I think that is the way to go for this UI. As for screen sizes/densities, wouldn't using dp units fix that issue? I'm going to give it a try and see where that ends up
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Have you taken a look at ViewFlipper? http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ViewFlipper.html This will give the side by side effect but you will have to make custom views for each group to populate it with the proper icons.

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I've looked at ViewFlipper, but I really haven't been able to figure out how to get it to do what I want. Any suggestions?
Here is a good example of Viewflipper android-journey.blogspot.com/2009/12/…
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I'd use a ListActivity for the first 3 top level items. This won't give you the auto centering effect that you'll probably want, but you should be able to look at the Gallery source code, which can be found here, and make some modifications to the ListActivity so that it autocenters.

For the next items, I'd add an onClick and a GestureListener so you can navigate to another activity with another list view. Since you know where you came from (add some data to your Intent) you can set the color rectangle on the left so that it appears that you have just swiped the whole view left.

If you need to customize the animation, you can call this:

overridePendingTransition(R.anim.slide_left_entry, R.anim.slide_left_exit);

To make the yellow icon look good as it animates to the left, I'd change the list bounds (on the first activity) to have no margins, and change the yellow icon to have square right edges - This will make the small yellow rectangle on the next activity appear to be part of the first activity.

It should be relatively easy to mock this up to see if it's going to work properly for you.

Good luck!

EDIT: Ok, so I've made a basic project that does most of what you want. here is the link to the eclipse project file. I was going to put the source up here, but there's a bit much to display.

What you still have to do:

  • Tweak animation
  • Configure the layer lists to display the correct colors
  • Add information to the top level intent for the sub-activity to be able to configure itself.
  • Quite a few other small things.

I think I've got the main stuff done. I've also added the gesture listener I talked about, although re-reading your question, you actually didn't ask for that. Since it's cool, I left it in.

Good Luck once again!!

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5 Comments

Hmmmm... I'm still pretty new with Android and UI stuff. Could you expound (maybe with some links or code too) on your suggestion?
I'll do it if you extend the bounty... ;). It's a bit of work.
How did this work for you? It shouldn't be too hard to customize it the way you want...
I actually got veto'd on the UI so I never got to try your idea :( I might try it out on another application that I'm thinking about developing, so I'll have to get back to you on that.
Oh well. It's a good UI idea, so hopefully it'll be useful in your other UI idea.
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Have you thought of launching Activities with different view configurations? You can switch from one activity to another with a gesture and you can Animate the views. What your UI looks like to me is a bunch of screens with affordances that show the other screens. So one Activity per screen maybe the same in different configurations or something like that.

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