Override Android GUI

Question

I am working on a special project of mine that should customize a bit the experience of Android users. The idea is that we should have customized navigation buttons in every Activity that allow the user going back and forth in the application.

I understood one basically cannot hide the navigation buttons in Android (especially from 4.x onward); but one could override their behaviour.

My question is two-fold:

• Can one customize those buttons (changing their look&feel, size, ...)

If that cannot be done:

• Is it feasible to create a master class that extends Activity and that presents the buttons all the time (so that I could inherit this class whenever I need those buttons)?

All feedbacks and criticisms are welcome.
Also, if you have other ideas about how to solve this issue, or if you have done differently in one of your project, please point me in the right (subjective) direction.

BEST.

Answer 1

Of course you can customize existing views, by many ways:

• You can change their styles, or background, states, etc.
• You can extend an existing view (TextView for example) and add properties

You can also define a custom ViewGroup by extending ViewGroup or a Layout (Linear, Relative, etc.). Finally, you can create a view from scratch, extending View.

See the DOC here about custom components

This lets you to do almost anything.

However, I would'nt recommand you to change the Android UI, because the user is familiar with it, and I think showing a "too customized" UI is not a good thing.

Hope this helps you

Note: If you want to customize the Android ActionBar, you will need to hide it and create your own (or use some libs like ActionBarSherlock)

Answer 2

I think you need to hide the action bar

like

ActionBar actionBar = getActionBar();
actionBar.hide();

and create a similar one (your own bar).