Mobile Application Development [22617] CO-6-I

Unit III
UI Components and Layouts

3.1 Introduction
 Designing an User Interface (UI), will be one of our most important
tasks during Android development. Android app's User Interface (UI)
is everything that the user can see and interact with.
 Android provides a variety of pre-built UI components such as
structured layout objects and UI controls that allows building the
Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the app.
 Android also provides other UI modules for special interfaces such as
dialogs, notifications and menus.
 Understanding layouts is important for good Android application
design. A layout defines the structure for a user interface in the app,
such as in an activity. All elements in the layout are built using a
hierarchy of View and ViewGroup objects.
 A View is considered as a basic building block for a Android User
Interface (UI). A View usually draws something the user can see and
interact with. Whereas, a ViewGroup is an invisible container that
defines the layout structure for View and other ViewGroup objects.
 The View objects are usually called "widgets" and can be one of many
subclasses, such as Button or TextView. The ViewGroup objects are
usually called "layouts" can be one of many types that provide a
different layout structure, such as LinearLayout.
 Input controls are the interactive components in the app's user
interface. Android provides a wide variety of controls we can use in
the UI, such as buttons, text fields, seek bars, check box, zoom
buttons, toggle buttons and many more.
 The Android directory is the place to put all our files, in whatever
folder hierarchy we want.

3.2 Control Flow

 Application components are the important part of an Android
application. All components are associated with the manifest file
AndroidManifest.xml that defines each component of the application
and way of interact.
 There are following four main components that can be used within
an Android application.

AIETP Computer Engineering Department Prof.D.R.Cholke

 Mobile Application Development [22617] CO-6-I

1. Activities
2. Services
3. Broadcast Receivers
4. Content Providers

 Additional components
1. Fragments
2. Views
3. Layouts
4. Intents
5. Resources
6. Manifest

3.3 Android Application Structure

AIETP Computer Engineering Department Prof.D.R.Cholke