Question

I have a screen with search options. Clicking an option has the effect of showing a dialog or redirecting to another screen, which is why I can’t use the “Settings” application approach: showing the next screen on the right-side.

On a tablet, my screen looks like this:

Which is not very neat. I think we’ve all read the wooonderful design guidelines for Android, offering solutions only for the simplest problems, such as turning:

into:

I have found no guidelines for multi-pane layouts other than “add a list view and a details view in the same screen, yo”. Should I split up my ListView into smaller ListViews (each section in a ListView)? are there other applications that do this?

Answer 1

There are a lot of links here in a similar question:

How many Activities vs Fragments?

Here are a few more:

• http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/android-30-fragments-api.html

• http://developer.android.com/guide/components/fragments.html

• Patterns when to use Activity Transition vs Dynamic Fragments

• Android – I need some clarifications of fragments vs activities and views

• Activities or fragments in Android?

• Multiple fragments and activities interaction design

Also, yes you can certainly split your ListViews into smaller ListViews. Fragments should make this easier to maintain as well.

You might also look into the ActionBar tabs — there is a lot of info here as well:

http://developer.android.com/training/design-navigation/descendant-lateral.html