Question

I am new to Android development and having gone through the tutorial resources at developer.android.com, I’m still not clear which layouts are most useful in different circumstances.

To give a specific example, I would like to be able to replicate the UI from the Ebay application i.e a menu bar at the top and bottom of the screen and a panel in the middle. The bottom toolbar has buttons of equal size even when the length of the text differs.

I thought about implementing using a TableLayout with three rows, the top and bottom row containing the toolbars. Then for the bottom row I added a Linear Layout and added Buttons.

However my buttons are not of equal size and I’m also not sure that this is the best way to layout this UI configuration.

Can somebody provide the XML to achive this.

Thanks

Answer 1

To make two buttons equal in the row you might try:

<LinearLayout android:orientation="vertical">
    <Button android:layout_weight="1" android:layout_width="0dip"/>
    <Button android:layout_weight="1" android:layout_height="0dip"/>
</LinearLayout>

“weight” tells the widget how much of the free space it consumes. two equal weigths = equal size.
E.g a weight of 2 and another of 1 means that widget one uses 2/3 of the space and widget two uses 1/3

I am not going to post a layout, the layout you may choose heavily depends on what you are planning to do and how.

Hope that helps