Chapter 7. Building a View

Android comes with many requirements that herald complexity in the user interface; it’s a multiprocessing system that supports multiple concurrent applications, accepts multiple forms of input, is highly interactive, and is flexible enough to support a wide range of devices now and in the future. The user interface is both rich and easy to use.

This chapter provides you with the techniques for implementing a graphical interface on Android. It explains the architecture of the Android UI toolkit, while showing you in practical terms how to use basic interface elements such as buttons and text boxes. It also covers event handling, using multiple threads to offload long-running tasks so that the UI doesn’t freeze, and other topics that make user interfaces pleasant and performant.