I'm having a weird problem. I have been testing my app with hdpi resources up until recently. My designer sent over some mdpi assets and now my application is defaulting to the mdpi assets. How can I make sure the hdpi assets are being used for my phone?
your device was defaulting to the hdpi graphics because there were no other graphics available. but since you now added mdpi, your phone has a choice between the 2 and it will choose the most compatible for the device. you can't force your application to use HDPI unless you only supply the HDPI graphics
You cant, the hdpi, mdpi etc are handset attributes. If you design the app correctly you will have an asset hierarchy that will address all screen densities. So I recommend that you focus on that.
To elaborate, for a robust android app, you will have resources in hdpi, mdpi, ldpi and xdpi folders, maybe even ndpi folders, all based on a well defined asset heirarchy. You can read more about it here.
Related
I’m new to Android programming and I’m stuck with a very specific problem. I want my application to run on multiple screen sizes and densities.
I have several real devices with different screen resolutions (Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge [xxxhdpi], Samsung Galaxy A5(6) [xxhdpi], Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet [xhdpi].
I made one background and scaled it down for every generalized density. I saved the files as “background.png” in separate folders like suggested in Supporting Multiple Screens.
After testing the APK on the devices, everything worked fine except the background on the S7. It will always load the next lower resolution bitmap (xxhdpi instead of xxxhdpi). I looked countless threads how to fix this problem but nothing worked so far.
The resolutions of my bitmaps are:
drawable-mdpi //320x480
drawable-hdpi //480x800
drawable-xhdpi //720x1280
drawable-xxhdpi //1080X1920
drawable-xxxhdpi //1440X2560
I hope that someone can help me on this one. I’m really losing my mind.
This is a little complex but I'll try to keep it simple. The android system chooses the right resources based on a lot of factors (which you can see when you create a new resource file under the "Available qualifiers" list) which you can group to create a resource shared by different configurations or use only one of them to specify one particular configuration. But you cannot control witch resource the device will use for the most part (there are some you can specify yourself ex: night mode). Your S7 probably uses the wrong resource because probably one of the settings for the display resolution is set at a lower setting (ex: battery saving modes lower resolution, gaming mode.. etc, accessibility settings). And if you want a tablet to use a different drawable then a phone then you should use the "smallest screen width" qualifier since you can specify different screen sizes in Dip(ex: sw320dp is a normal phone, sw440dp is a big pixel phone, sw720dp is a medium tablet and sw1048dp is a bigger tablet). Read more here
I'm also facing like this. My app only works on high resolution mobile only. Then I found that error. I placed my drawable on drawable-hdpi only . For every assets we have to place default drawable in drawable folder
put default drawable in that folder.
drawable
For handling images on the s7 device we can give height and width to the image view. Set the values for height and width from the dimens file. For handling s7 UI need to add the dimens-sw411 file and specify the height and width in that.
At present the resolution of Android wear devices is:
280x280 or
320x320
Does anyone know if you should have graphics for both the screen sizes and place them under the hdpi and xhdpi folders?
Also is there a way to auto scale down your images from 320x320 so that they work on a 280x280 device?
Thanks!
hdpi should be all that you need, all watches are a hdpi density
I would create background images at 320x320 and android will automatically scale them down to 280x280 if needed.
You will need to watch out for round devices, as they are 320x320 but the corners will be cut off
I'm trying to understand multi-screen support in android. Yes I read the documentation, but still have few questions.
As I understand i need to create drawables for each density, but what to do with text size?
I want to set title on my activity which will fit any screen (need to big big enough and don't warp the text)
I test in on my Nexus7 (large screen) and it looks good with android:textSize="100dp"'
When i launch it on emulator with 'normal screen' size i get very big text.
So is it right solution to make layouts for each screen size?
'layout'
'layout-large'
'layout-small'
....
and just make android:textSize="70dp" for normal screen and android:textSize="50dp" for small screen?
And another one question how to test all this in more efficient way?
I need to create emulators with? Where to get parameters with which create emulators to get this results?
XLarge screen
ldpi
mdpi
tvdpi
hdpi
xhdpi
Large screen
ldpi
mdpi
tvdpi
hdpi
xhdpi
Medium screen
ldpi
mdpi
tvdpi
hdpi
xhdpi
Small screen
ldpi
mdpi
tvdpi
hdpi
xhdpi
For text size you should use sp units. Docs say:
Scale-independent Pixels - This is like the dp unit, but it is also
scaled by the user's font size preference. It is recommend you use
this unit when specifying font sizes, so they will be adjusted for
both the screen density and the user's preference.
As I understand i need to create drawables for each density, but what to do with text size?
As WebnetMobile indicates, you start by using sp, as this takes the user's choice of font scale into account. However, you may need more than that.
So is it right solution to make layouts for each screen size?
I would recommend using dimension resources, with different definitions for the text size dimension as needed for your different scenarios.
Where possible, though, design your UI to be more flexible about font sizes. Again, if you use sp, the user can change the size of the text on Android 4.0+, to make it bigger or smaller, to help them read the text on their device. Hence, you cannot assume that you are in complete control over the size of the font, and therefore need to design accordingly. This is not significantly different than designing a Web site that takes into account users' adjustments to font size in their browser.
And another one question how to test all this in more efficient way? I need to create emulators with?
You will need emulators or devices for whatever scenarios concern you.
Where to get parameters with which create emulators to get this results?
On the (now-current) R21 versions of the tools, you set the screen size and density in the Device Definitions tab of the AVD Manager, then create AVDs based upon those definitions as needed.
Inorder to test in different screens and density you can create emulators with different combinations. When we create the emulator device we can set the Density (Abstracted LCD density under hardware).
ldpi - 120
mdpi - 160
hdpi - 240
xhdpi - 320
You can set the screen size also while start the emulator
I'd like my app to work on phones (320x480 usually) and tablets (840x600, 800x600 and 1024x600).
I'm not sure which resolution to design for and how it would scale on various devices. Can anyone please suggest what resolution and dpi should I use?
Discussing this with Tim Bray in a conference he said:
You should design for the biggest resolution and the higher dpi and then scale to the smaller ones.
Right now I think that tablet version requieres a different layout with different UX. For instance I would try using Fragments on the tablet version of my app.
Have a look at this resource:
Supporting Multiple Screens
Android handles different screen resolutions automatically in that you specify sizes in "dip" (device independent pixels) and by providing different drawable folders (drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi, drawable-ldpi) where drawables are fetched depending on the resolution capabilities of the device your app is running on.
If you want to target tablets specifically, then I'd start coding for the Honeycomb system. Devices will be available soon ;) The SDK is already available on the developer.android.com site.
Recently i developed a android app its in the market by name Starrpartners in this i use the design of 320x480 as a target and putting the images in mdpi folder. it worked pretty well on higher resolution as well .
You can check it by making your app and running it on different resolution simulator .
Hope it helps :)
At the moment I have just targeted my UI graphics for the hdpi resolutions for android and this works flawlessly, the graphics are designed with 3 resolutions in mind with only the background image being altered really. Problem is the plan was to use the same images for hdpi (480x800 and 480x854) and as well as mdpi (320x480). But when I test it for mdpi with the images in both the -hdpi and copied into -mdpi it doesn't scale them down, do I have to resize all the images and have them duplicated for the mdpi screens?
Sorry if this is not very eloquent it is the first time I have done any UI design for android and still don't understand it properly.
Android should correctly use the right image when you use R.drawable and your images are in drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi etc. Since that is what I think you've described as what you've done, it hints that maybe you've hardcoded a size? Are you using ImageView and set a size for them? If so, did you do it in Java code or in XML? If in Java code the values would be in pixels, so 50px on mdpi screens will look larger than on hdpi screens. If you used XML did you again set a size with px? If so, you should use dp.