Ask HN: How do I convert a PSD design to Android xml? Hi everyone, I've been toying with android apps the past couple of days and cannot seem to get my head around the entire UI and layout development. I've been programming in Java for the past year so I'm fairly familiar with the language and I've been front end developing in CSS for a couple years now but I can seem to make the transition. If anybody could point me towards some online resources that would be great. Thanks a lot |
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/declaring-layou...
Generally speaking, though, your question seems to imply that you expect the conversion process to be fairly direct, splitting up the image into little page sprites as is often done with web pages. That's not at all an ideal way to try to implement an Android UI.
Unless you want to take the easy way out and make this a native app that wraps a WebView and do all the layout in HTML you're going to have to spend quite a bit of time reading about Android layouts, the Android resource system and Android styles, all of which are quite different than HTML/CSS. Everything you need to know is on that Android site, and be sure to look through the SDK examples as well.
There are plenty of gotchas in Android development, but on the other hand, there are plenty of ways to get assistance online, primarily by doing research and looking at other people's code.
Thanks for the reply, I gave the wrong idea with the word convert I mean't manually code but I can't seem to find many online resources that go into detail about going from a photoshop design to a coded user interface.