I did some digging around this a while back and Mark is on the money, it'll take a big chunk of time. But I would agree there are plenty of uses for things like horizontal lists, in fact there's a very prominent one in the core SMS app which allows you to choose a word from a list of predictions. So in answer to the question, perhaps you can make use of the code for that to give you a head start, found in:
CandidateView.java This doesn't extend ListView, or BaseAdapterView but simply View. I had to slightly modify ListView and ended up having to jump through many hoops to make a small change, I'm finishing up an app which has very styled user interface elements and I've found the SDK makes creating custom components very easy, but extending existing components is very hard because it is understandably restrictive. This is quite often than not to do with ListView because it has so much useful functionality baked in to support adapters, states, touch, keyboard and trackball input that is just frustrating to re-implement. It's a problem because we want to be creating more expressive UIs where it improves on the standard, right now that usually means spending an great deal of time studying the source code and seeing if it can be achieved through composition or existing methods (sometimes over-complicating the view hierarchy) and more often copying the entire source code for one (often two) base classes so that you can modify a key private field and not lose out on performance. The easy answer is to just stick to the basics UIs we're used to seeing, but I really hope things get a bit more flexible so that more people can creative compelling-looking apps that don't just look like they've been put together in a drag and drop GUI form builder. Regards, Richard On 25 Dec 2010, at 23:41, Mark Murphy wrote: > On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 6:27 PM, jotobjects <jotobje...@gmail.com> wrote: >> But UI designers don't >> take "the API doesn't do that" as a reason for changing the design. > > UI designers can ask for whatever they want. It is up to engineers to > explain to management that the designers are asking for things that > are not natively implemented on the platform and therefore will > require significant additional engineering time. It is then > management's responsibility to determine whether the UI designers > feature is worth that additional engineering time. > >> There are lots of posts in this forum with developers asking for >> horizontal scrolling and horizontal list views. It's a natural UI >> design element for some kinds of lists. It behaves somewhat like a >> drop down list (in that is is expandable) without obscuring the other >> widgets on the screen. The user can drag it (scroll) back and forth. > > I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I am saying you have your work cut out > for you, and I am saying that I believe that it "has not been done a > 100 times already". > > -- > Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy) > http://commonsware.com | http://github.com/commonsguy > http://commonsware.com/blog | http://twitter.com/commonsguy > > Android Training in Atlanta: http://bignerdranch.com/classes/android > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
