I'm building an app that includes photo tagging. In order to display the tags on a tagged photo, I was looking for a layout that could absolute position the tags over the image and allow them to be clickable, etc.
Naturally, my first instinct was to look at AbsoluteLayout (I'm trying to absolute position something, this just seems logical). I discovered that it was deprecated and came across all of these StackOverflow answers and Android mailing list threads describing why AbsoluteLayout is evil and how I'm a naughty child for wanting to use it. The argument boiled down to this: multiple screen sizes in Android would make it so your layout would be difficult to maintain and look like crap on different phones. I would agree with that assessment for most cases, and I can see how people may misuse an AbsoluteLayout. I think using the following technique, however, there is no better layout to use than AbsoluteLayout. My tags' coordinates are defined in percentages rather than pixels. At runtime, I get the width and height of the image I'm overlaying, and calculate the pixel coordinates of the tags. The tags are then added to the AbsoluteLayout using the calculated coordinates. If the image expands or shrinks on different sized screens, it won't matter because the coordinates of the tags will scale along with it. To avoid getting the rug pulled out from under me if AbsoluteLayout is ever all of a sudden removed from the SDK, I ended up using a FrameLayout and setting top and left margins (the exact same effect) to position the tags. So my question is this: if there is a case where AbsoluteLayout is the best tool to use, why is it deprecated? -- 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
