Designing a complex android UI with animation

Question

I've to design a UI for an Android app where i've 10 vertical tiles containing image and text(the 2 big boxes in the picture) and on clicking a tile, it disappears and is replaced by scrollable gridview containing 6 elements(shown in the centre of figure below) on the same page. (shown by an animation)

Here is a snapshot of the view I'm trying to explain. This images shows only 2 out of 10 tiles and a gridview which appears on click Each of the white box contains image and text. I'm not good at designing, so a detailed answer of implementing this would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

There is not much details in your question, even the picture does not clarify everything, but here is a stab at it.

Not sure what you mean when you say the tiles "expand" further, do you expect to see the six tiles in the middle to appear at that time or are they always there? if they appear, would that be animated?

To achieve the picture you have, you should probably get a RelativeLayout at the top level. That's just because you have this date TextView on the top right and the handle to a SlidingDrawer at the bottom. You can set the background of that RelativeLayout with your wallpaper theme and I guess the blue bar on top if that's static.

Then inside this top-leve RelativeLayout you have a LinearLayout with an horizontal orientation. This one will contain the three "windows" on your picture.

In that horizontal LinearLayout, first you have another LinearLayout with a vertical orientation, then a ViewPager and then another vertical LinearLayout similar to the first one (not sure how the right part is different from the left one or that is supposed to be a complete mirror... ?).

So in summary:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout
    android:id="@+id/top_level"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent">

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/date_text"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_alignParentRight="true"
        android:layout_alignParentTop="true"
        android:paddingTop="..." // fill in some space to offset from the top of the screen
        android:paddingRight="..." // same thing to keep it off the right edge
        />
    <LinearLayout
        android:layout_height="..." // set the height of your content in the center of your screen
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_below="@+id/date_text"
        android:orientation="horizontal" >

        <LinearLayout
            android:layout_height="fill_parent"
            android:layout_width="wrap_content"
            android:orientation="vertical" >

            < add here some of the stuff you have above your tile like that RSS icon and so on />
            <ListView
                android:id="@+id/tile_list"
                android:layout_height="fill_parent"
                android:layout_width="fill_parent"/>
        </LinearLayout>

        <ViewPager
            android:id="@+id/pager"
            android:layout_height="fill_parent"
            android:layout_width="0dp"
            android:layout_weight="1" // so that will fill the remaining space between the left and the right parts
            />

        <LinearLayout
            android:layout_height="fill_parent"
            android:layout_width="wrap_content"
            android:orientation="vertical" >

            < add here some of the stuff you have above your tile like that RSS icon and so on />
            <ListView
                android:id="@+id/tile_list"
                android:layout_height="fill_parent"
                android:layout_width="fill_parent"/>
        </LinearLayout>

    </LinearLayout>

    <SlidingDrawer
        android:id="@+id/drawer"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:handle="@+id/drawer_handle"
        android:content="@+id/drawer_contents">

        <ImageView
            android:id="@+id/drawer_handle"
            android:src="@drawable/image for the tab..."
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content">
        </ImageView>

        <Another Layout for the content of the drawer
            android:id="@+id/drawer_contents"
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        >
            ....
        </Close that layout>

    </SlidingDrawer>

</RelativeLayout>

From there, there is still quite a few things to fill up and some code to write to fill the lists of tiles (on the left and right), handle when the user click on an item, and then also display the content of the ViewPager in the middle of the screen. You'll probably want to use a GridLayout in each page there.

If you need to hide that ViewPager until the user click on some tile, you can set the visibility to hidden and change it in your code.

UPDATE Now there is more information on how this moves......

OK, so keep the top level RelativeLayout with the date and the SlidingDrawer at the bottom.

In the middle part, you can use the HorizontalListView that was put together by this person: How can I make a horizontal ListView in Android?, the code and instructions and example can be found here: http://www.dev-smart.com/archives/34

Then you need to create your own Adapter to populate that List. You can base it off the BaseAdapter (that decision is more dependent on how your images / information is stored).

In the getView function of that Adapter, can have a layout where both the collapsed and expanded views are combined into one FrameLayout, but only one is visible at a time. It will look like something like this:

<FrameLayout
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent" // assuming the HorizontalListView is set with the right height
    >

    <LinearLayout
        android:id="@+id/collapsed_view"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:orientation="vertical" >

        < add here some of the stuff you have above your tile like that RSS icon and so on />
     </LinearLayout>

    <ViewPager
        android:id="@+id/expanded_view"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent"
        android:layout_width="0dp"
        android:layout_weight="1" // so that will fill the remaining space between the left and the right parts
        android:visibility="gone"
        />

</FrameLayout>

In the list adapter, you will need to set proper tags to the different views, so when a user clicks on one image, you know which one was clicked. To expand one view, you change the visibility of the LinearLayout to gone and the one of the ViewPager to visible.

If there should only be only one expanded at a time, you can have a state variable in your Adapter to say which one it is and set the visibility properties correctly for all the views in the list. Then you call invalidate on the ListView to have it refreshed.

There is quite a bit of code to write to do all this, but if you keep it organized, it should not be too bad....