Developing UI for Android

Question

I am planning to develop an Android based mobile for my Human Computer Interaction based project. I am looking for a UI designing application for Android platform. Can it be achieved with Eclipse or is there a better way of developing UI for Android applications that could be used directly with coding ?

Thanks, Manoj

Answer 1

You can directly code your UI too if you want to. It just takes long, and you open a window for errors.

Developing UI with eclipse using XML is great and easy, why don't you want to use it?

If by UI you mean "not-the-basic-UI", then it's possible too with eclipse - if you want a customized view then you code it, and if you want the normal UI views to look differently, theres a way to do that too (I'm pretty sure you can set your own pictures for button-state-pressed, button-state-selected and so on...)

You need to be more specific with what you want to do.

Answer 2

Use java EE eclipse with (Android Development Tools) plug-in. Upgrade the android SDK in eclipse.

Answer 3

Eclipse has an extension called ADT (Android Development Tools).

Hope you have installed it. Here is the link for installing Android in Eclipse.

Eclipse provides the help for design the UI for android. It is just drag and drop.

Hope this helps

Answer 4

Eclipse has a builtin GUI builder that is fairly good, there is also DroidDraw, which may be slightly easier to use. I would recommend using Eclipse's builder myself, both are somewhat limited without hand-coding XML really.

Quick side note: Be sure NOT to use AbsoluteLayout, as I have seen a few people starting out with Android programming fall into the pitfall of thinking it will make GUI design easier. Issues will arise very quickly.