After reading part one which discusses what Views and ViewGroups are, as well as how to create them in XML, the next step is to incorporate them into your Android application. How you use the UI you wrote depends on what it’s used for. Let’s break down some of the key things:

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Many of the posts on this site so far deal with nuanced tricks such as RecyclerView swiping/drag and drops, and often make the assumption that the reader has already worked with the Android UI. This post is going to break it down for the beginners, teaching you the fundamentals of mobile UI development and where you can pick up on skills to move forward.

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For those of you who haven’t upgraded to Android Studio 1.4 yet, you may not have realized there is a new Navigation Drawer template in the New Project menu. While templates are great, they don’t always give you the full story. Modifying the Navigation View can be tricky if you don’t know where to look, and you may not understand why certain things are written as they are. This post is going to walk you through the process of creating your own Navigation View, and discussing some of the differences between this and the previous model.

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When it comes to making an app, some of the biggest struggles developers face is outside of the code itself. What should I name the app? Who is my target audience? Or the one I struggle with the most: what colors should I use in my Android application?

This last question does not have one right or wrong answer. For that reason, it is one of the hardest questions to answer. Thankfully, there are many tools out there to help you determine your applications color scheme, and these are my five favorites.

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The RecyclerView.Adapter class is used to bind a dataset to a RecyclerView to be displayed to a user. As I explained in another post, RecyclerView Vs ListView, the RecyclerView.Adapter forces the use of the ViewHolder pattern, which may be hard to understand when switching to a RecyclerView from a ListView. In this short post I am going to reference my MovieAdapter class from my Swipe-To-Dismiss example, and break it down to explain the required implementations and how to use the RecyclerView adapter.

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