Making your app tablet-friendly in 3 steps

The Android tablets are here, and so are the non-tablet-optimised applications. To ensure that tablet users have a good experience using your app, a few optimisations are necessary to make it feel native. The three most important of these are described in this article, all with backward compatibility using the official Android compatibility library.

This article will focus on optimising for the the Android 3.0+ Honeycomb tablets, even though there are a some tablets out there with a firmware version below 3.0. I expect you to have some basic knowledge about Android development.

Throughout this article we will develop a tablet friendly recipe application with backward-compatibility and phone support.

Presenting Balance and Budget

We are happy to announce our new Android application Balance and Budget. The application makes balance and budget management easy, simple, and fast, and it does an excellent job of giving you an overview of your different accounts.

Android Plurals

A useful, but sadly rarely used string resource is plurals. Plurals are used for words or phrases which are spelled differently in the singular and the plural.

Android Preferences

Preferences are an important part of an Android application. It is important to let the users have the choice to modify and personalize their application depending on their needs.

In the screenshots "custom" is spelled "costum". The typo is fixed in the code examples.

Android preferences can be set in two ways. You can create a preferences.xml file in the res/xml directory, or you can set the preferences from code.
The first example shows a preferences.xml file. Every preference needs to have a android:key value, that we call to get the preference's value. The android:title is the preference's title, and the android:summary is a summary about the preference. The android:defaultValue is the default value of the preference - fx. true or false.
Currently there are 5 different preference views:

• The CheckBoxPreference is a simple checkbox, that can return true or false.
• The ListPreference, which shows a radioGroup where only 1 item can be selected a time. The android:entries links to an array in the res/values/arrays, and the android:entryValues is an other array with the items to be returned.
• The EditTextPreference shows a dialog with an editText view. This returns a String.
• The RingtonePreference shows a radioGroup that shows the ringtones.
• The Preference is a custom preference. This works like a Button.
• The PreferenceScreen is a screen with preferences. When you have a PreferenceScreen inside an other PreferenceScreen, it simply opens a new screen with other preferences.
• The PreferenceCategory is a category with preferences.